Specialization in the AI Era: A Hardware Designer's Perspective with Raghu Balasubramanian

Abstract: What does it mean to specialize when AI can write your code, structure your thoughts, and communicate your ideas? Drawing on a decade of experience at Google, Waymo, and now Etched, I'll share how AI is shifting the skills that are valuable to a career - from being an expert in a narrow field, towards ideation, creativity, deep problem understanding and directing automation.

I'll walk through stories from my own path: observations that led to new projects, limitations I learned to work around, and what "productive struggles" translate to when shortcuts help everywhere. I'll share how we work at Etched today and how that reshapes how we interview - what we look for in engineers entering this new landscape.

You'll leave with a framework for building a career where AI makes you a more capable, higher value engineer, not more replaceable. 

Bio: Raghu is an ASIC design engineer and architect at Etched, where he's helping build specialized silicon for transformers, the architecture powering modern LLMs - building the hardware for superintelligence.

His career in silicon design spans over a decade of pushing the boundaries of specialized compute architectures. At Waymo, Raghu worked on compute chips for autonomous vehicles, and at Google and YouTube, he developed video codec accelerators and networking chips.

He holds a Master's in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked under Professor Karu Sankaralingam on reliability. He also has a Master's in Signal Processing from the National University of Singapore and a Master's in Physics from BITS Pilani, India.

Outside of work, Raghu is an instrument-rated private pilot and, together with his wife, mentors high school students competing in FIRST Robotics competitions.