From Frontend to the Frontiers of Silicon with Moores Lab AI

What have you built at Moores Lab AI that your past self wouldn’t have believed you could pull off?

In my past experience, building a GUI and launching it properly took several months. Here, we move at the speed of AI, and we’ve shipped strong GUIs for every product we’ve launched. I’m extremely proud of how much we’ve built, and how thoroughly, in such a short time.

I was the first engineer Moores Lab AI hired. At the time, the company had a prototype with a long way to go. Today we have a full ecosystem of products that I think of as the Adobe Suite for silicon engineers. Together, they cover one of the longest timelines in the SystemVerilog world from start to finish. SpecAgent produces a professional spec. DesignAgent turns it into well-written RTL. VerifAgent builds a full verification testbench. DebugAgent closes the bugs and gaps. CoverageAgent gets you to full coverage, so you can launch with confidence. My past self would not have believed he’d help build that.

What surprised you most about the culture once you were on the inside?

How adaptive we are. In a startup, the plan you start the quarter with is rarely the plan you end it with. What surprised me is how quickly this team can change direction without losing momentum. When something isn’t working, we don’t schedule a meeting about it. We rethink the approach, rebuild what needs rebuilding, and ship.

A big part of that comes from the camaraderie. We’re a tight team that has each other’s backs, and everyone is pulling in the same direction. That direction comes from leadership with a strong vision. It’s a breath of fresh air to work under leaders who know exactly where the company is going and have the experience and execution to get it there. When you trust the vision, moving fast feels exciting instead of chaotic. Looking back at how far we’ve come since I joined, it’s hard to believe it’s the same company.

What’s a skill you’ve picked up here that was never in your job description?

Management. I was hired to write frontend code, and today I lead the frontend team and manage a team of QA and frontend developers. We also own our infrastructure, DevOps, and more. Nobody gives you a manual for that, especially at a startup, so I learned it the way I learn everything: by doing it, getting some of it wrong, and fixing it.

You came into semiconductors from web and frontend work. What’s it like being a software engineer among chip verification experts?

I spent about ten years in frontend development before joining Moores Lab AI, so I came in knowing how to make complicated software usable, but not much about silicon. That turned out to be a useful combination. Professionals want their tools to be fast, predictable, and out of the way. Verification engineers are no different. They just work in waveforms and testbenches instead of web pages.

What I bring is the perspective of someone who has spent a career making complicated tools easy to use. What they bring is decades of knowledge about how silicon breaks. The stakes are much higher than in web development. A bug that escapes into silicon can cost millions. So I’ve had to raise my own bar, and I’ve learned more from these engineers than from any course I could have taken.

What’s one way the company has invested in your growth that made a real difference?

They gave me scope before I was sure I was ready for it. In a little over a year I went from lead frontend engineer to manager to Principal Software Engineer. Each step came with real ownership, not just a new title. When I’ve proposed a new direction for a product, leadership hasn’t asked for months of justification. They’ve asked what I needed.

That kind of trust changes how you work. You stop asking “am I allowed to fix this?” and start asking “what’s the right way to fix this?” Most of my growth here came from being handed hard problems and being trusted to solve them.

What’s a myth about AI in chip verification that you’d happily kill off?

It’s a huge myth that AI is still years away from being useful in chip design. People talk about it as if it’s a research project. It’s not. Our products are in use today, and they’re turning work that used to take years into a matter of days. That isn’t a roadmap slide. It’s happening now.

Another myth is that AI replaces verification engineers. What I’ve seen is the opposite. The agents take on the tedious parts: writing boilerplate, chasing coverage holes, drafting documentation. That frees engineers to focus on the judgment calls that matter. Someone still has to know whether a design is correct, and that person is more valuable than ever.

What’s it like seeing engineers use what you’ve built?

It’s hard to put into words. The first time I watched a verification engineer run one of our products on a real design, I didn’t say much. I just watched. Work that I knew used to take a team months was unfolding right there on the screen, and I could see the exact moment it clicked for them. They leaned in. They started asking what else it could do.

That feeling hasn’t worn off. Every panel they open and every button they click is something our team sat down and built, sometimes only weeks earlier. Watching it hold up on real silicon, in the hands of people who have spent their entire careers in this field, is humbling in the best possible way.

I’ve built a lot of software over the years, and most of it made someone’s day a little easier. This is different. Chips power everything: the phone in your pocket, the car you drive, the medical equipment keeping people alive. Knowing that something I helped build is changing how those chips get made gives me chills. Some days I still can’t believe I get to be a part of it.

For someone worried they don’t tick every box, how steep is the learning curve here, and how much support do you get?

The learning curve is steep. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Semiconductor verification has decades of vocabulary, tools, and standards, and you won’t learn them in a month. But you don’t need to know all of it on day one. I certainly didn’t.

What matters is whether you’re good at your own craft and willing to learn the domain around it. If you are, people here will meet you halfway. The verification experts will explain the “why” behind things, and you’ll bring skills they don’t have. Some of the most useful things I’ve built came from not knowing how things are “supposed” to be done in EDA. If you’re worried you don’t tick every box, I’d say that’s a sign you’re asking the right questions. Apply anyway.

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