I find your company fascinating, having also worked on chips (and chip dev tooling) for much of my career.

> But they want to work on chips, not devtools!

I have long had a gut feeling that there's an entire industry of frustrating tools specifically to keep that industry alive. I once was shocked to learn that my company had bought licenses for a tool specifically to combine multiple IP-XACT specs into one... basically just parsing several XML files and combining their data! Outrageous.

RE orchestration: It's easy-ish now since it sounds like you're starting out with (free) open source tools, but once you start looking at things like license fair-share, you might find yourself starting to build yet-another-Slurm/LSF.

Any reason for buck2 vs bazel? Bazel seems more active (O(thousands) questions on StackOverflow for Bazel vs O(hundreds) for buck).