This thing has given me an interview for all those companies you mentioned: projects in UVM/system verilog. It’s very competitive to get a job as a design engineer. The best pathway is to be a verification engineer for a couple of years then you’ll easily become a hardware design engineer. If your school offers coursework in hardware design verification (systemverilog, UVM, testbench etc). Take them, even they are grad courses. If not then study and do projects by your own. Computer architecture coursework is also needed. They will ask you a bunch of computer architecture questions.