Hardware and ML Research Engineer / ML for EDA and hardware design

Aman Desai

I'm a research engineer at ChipAgents, working on ML for EDA and hardware design. The public thread is simple: use software to make hardware design feedback easier to understand earlier in the flow.

I use this site as a working notebook: experience, short notes, and project writeups I still stand behind.

NowApril 30, 2026Tightening this into a working notebook: experience, short notes, and a public view of the ML-for-EDA lane.

Experience

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Nov 2025 - present

Hardware and ML Research Engineer

ChipAgents

Research engineer since Jan 2026 after a Nov 2025 to Jan 2026 internship.
Working on ML for EDA and hardware design workflows, including PPA estimation.
Public tooling context includes Yosys, OpenSTA, OpenROAD, and LibreLane.
Keeping details light until more of the work is public.

Apr 2024 - Feb 2026

Computer Architecture Researcher

UC Santa Barbara Arch Lab

Worked on an OpenPiton-based OS project that treated accelerators as first-class components.
Built accelerator wrappers and low-level C benchmarks to compare software baselines against hardware versions.
Worked on Tapir, the EQSAT project for hardware and architecture research.

Jun 2025 - Sep 2025

Software Development Engineer Intern

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Built a full-stack data processing pipeline for large regression test suites.
Turned distributed test outputs into reports and dashboard views deployed with CloudFormation.

Sep 2024 - Nov 2024

Software Engineer Intern

Blockhouse

Built dashboards for per-company profit margins against standard investment policies.
Connected computation pipelines and ML model outputs to website views.

Dec 2024 - 2025

President and Founder

ACM Industry

Connected UCSB students with companies through scoped engineering projects.