How Tech Layoffs Are Reshaping Hardware and Systems Engineering Jobs at Intel, Nvidia, and Apple

The past two years have reshaped the hardware and systems engineering job market in ways that are still playing out. Intel has gone through its most significant restructuring in decades. Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and several FPGA companies have made targeted cuts. At the same time, Nvidia has added thousands of hardware engineers, and Apple Silicon is still one of the most aggressively hiring teams in the industry. Understanding which side of this divide you are on — and how to position yourself accordingly — is as important as any interview preparation.

What actually happened at Intel

Intel's situation warrants its own treatment because it is the largest restructuring in the chip industry in 20 years. The company announced plans to cut its global headcount by 15,000 people in 2024, then accelerated further cuts in 2025 as it exited several product lines and restructured its foundry business.

The engineering roles most affected:

Process development — Intel paused or wound down several advanced-node programs, reducing the teams working on EUV process qualification and novel device architectures.
Client PC silicon — as PC market growth stalled, teams working on Intel Core product lines saw consolidation.
Networking and connectivity — after selling Mobileye and spinning off other divisions, the internal networking silicon organization shrank significantly.

The roles that survived and, in some cases, grew:

Foundry services (Intel Foundry) — Intel's attempt to become a contract manufacturer for external chip companies requires process engineers, design enablement, and PDK development.
AI accelerator and data-center chips (Gaudi) — while Gaudi has not reached Nvidia's scale, the team has continued to hire selectively.
Verification and DFT — test and verification are among the last functions cut in any restructuring because they are needed to qualify chips already in development.

If you are an Intel engineer navigating this environment, the honest advice is to document your accomplishments in terms of chip yield, schedule impact, and cross-functional ownership — the metrics that transfer well to other companies — and begin interview preparation before you need to, not after.

Where Nvidia is hiring

Nvidia is in a different situation from every other company in this analysis. The AI compute demand that has driven Nvidia's revenue from $26 billion in fiscal 2023 to over $130 billion in fiscal 2025 has created hardware hiring needs that the company has struggled to fill fast enough.

The teams with the most active hardware hiring:

ASIC design — Blackwell, Rubin, and the accelerators that come after them require large RTL and verification teams. Nvidia is hiring aggressively at every level from new graduate to principal engineer.
Physical design — timing closure on billion-transistor dies at 4nm and 3nm requires a deep PD organization.
Network hardware — NVLink, NVSwitch, and the InfiniBand networking that connects Nvidia's DGX and HGX clusters require dedicated hardware teams.
Systems engineering — rack-scale thermal and power systems for NVL72 and similar dense GPU clusters are a significant and growing team.

Nvidia's interview bar is high — see our NVIDIA ASIC interview guide for what to expect — but the volume of open roles means that candidates who are close to the bar have a real chance of getting through, unlike in a slower hiring environment.

Apple's hiring trajectory

Apple Silicon hiring has remained consistent through the broader industry downturn for a specific reason: Apple's hardware roadmap is multi-year and committed. The M-series and A-series chips are announced publicly, which means the engineering work for chips that ship in 2027 and 2028 is already underway. Apple does not hire for optionality — it hires because there is real work to do on real products.

The areas of active hiring within Apple's hardware organization:

CPU and GPU microarchitecture — the core of Apple Silicon, consistently one of the hardest positions to fill and one of the highest-paying hardware roles in the industry.
Neural Engine and ISP — ML accelerator and image signal processing teams have expanded as Apple's on-device AI capabilities have grown.
Vision Pro hardware — the second-generation and successor products require significant hardware work across displays, optical systems, and the R1 chip.
Mac and iPhone board design — component-level design, signal integrity, and power management for new product lines.

Apple did reduce headcount in some areas — notably in the autonomous vehicle project (Project Titan) — but its core silicon team has been insulated from those cuts.

The broader chip industry picture

Beyond the three companies above, the hardware job market is segmented by end market:

AI and HPC accelerators — growing rapidly. Nvidia leads, but AMD's Instinct MI-series has found enterprise customers, and startups including Groq, Cerebras, and Tenstorrent are all hiring hardware engineers for custom AI chip development.

Mobile SoCs — stable. Qualcomm's Snapdragon business is healthy, and MediaTek is expanding its TSMC-based designs. The Qualcomm interview process is covered in detail in our Qualcomm hardware interview guide.

Automotive — growing, but slower than the 2021–2023 hype cycle. Tesla's Dojo supercomputer and its FSD compute chips represent real hardware engineering at scale. Mobileye, despite its separation from Intel, continues to hire for vision processing silicon.

Wireline and wireless infrastructure — mixed. Broadcom, Marvell, and Ciena are active in data-center networking silicon. The cellular infrastructure market (base station silicon) has slowed as 5G buildout matures.

FPGA — consolidating. AMD's acquisition of Xilinx and Intel's Altera ownership mean the standalone FPGA market is now essentially a duopoly. Hiring at both has moderated, but design roles on next-generation FPGA fabric and HBM integration remain active.

What this means for your job search

If you are in AI or HPC hardware: Your skills are in high demand. Nvidia, AMD, and several well-funded startups are actively competing for engineers who can design and verify AI accelerators. The challenge is not finding opportunities — it is choosing among them and negotiating well.

If you are in PC or consumer silicon: The headwinds are real. The strategic path forward is either moving toward AI-adjacent hardware (memory, interconnect, accelerators) or broadening into systems engineering roles where your chip-design background is a differentiator.

If you are in data-center hardware systems: Demand is strong. The GPU cluster buildout requires thermal, power, and systems integration engineering at scale that few companies have done before.

If you are transitioning from a company that has cut significantly: Document your projects in terms of silicon outcomes — yield, schedule, power reduction — not just technical descriptions. These metrics transfer across companies and make your experience concrete in interviews.

The interview implication

One direct effect of the layoff cycle is that the interview bar has tightened at surviving companies. When hundreds of laid-off hardware engineers from Intel, ARM, and smaller companies are competing for the same Nvidia or Apple role, passing the technical bar requires real preparation — not just experience. The engineers who are getting offers in 2026 are the ones treating their interview loop like a product they are shipping, not a conversation they are walking into cold.

On MockVise you can prepare for hardware design and systems engineering interviews with engineers who have worked at the companies you are targeting, run through the technical rounds that matter most for your specific role, and build the interview consistency that converts a strong background into an actual offer.

The market is uneven. Preparation is the most reliable way to land on the right side of it.