Lead CPU Performance Analysis Engineer - Santa Clara, California, United States of America
$273,000 - $409,400 USD yearly
Originally posted 4 June 2026 by the employer.
About the role
As a Lead CPU Performance Analysis Engineer, you will work on CPU performance analysis and tuning, microbenchmark development, workload characterization, workload tracing, and competitive performance analysis using industry standard benchmarks and workloads.
What you'll do
- Collect CPU performance data for various workloads and benchmarks. - Conduct detailed workload characterization on silicon and performance simulators. - Profile workload execution and identify avenues for improving workload performance across software (OS, libraries, frameworks) and hardware. - Develop tools and techniques to collect representative workload traces to feed the CPU performance simulator. - Create micro-benchmarks to understand performance characteristics of competitor CPU and SoC designs. - Build competitive performance prediction models and present the competitive performance data concisely.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related field with 8+ years of Systems Engineering or related experience (or Master's with 7+ years, or PhD with 6+ years). - 2+ years of experience in one or more system architecture technology areas and products (e.g., Power System, Shared Resource Management, Limits/Thermal Management, Hardware Islands). - Strong grasp of computer architecture and OS fundamentals. - Strong scripting skills in Bash, Perl, or Python. - Proficiency in C, C++, and x86 or ARM compatible assembly language. - Familiarity with CPU performance models.
Nice to have
- Master’s degree or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science with 12 years of relevant work experience. - Experience with hardware performance profiling tools (such as VTune, perf) and binary instrumentation tools (such as DynamoRIO, PIN). - Experience characterizing industry standard benchmarks (e.g., CPU2017, Geekbench, AnTuTu, Speedometer) and workloads such as Memcached, NGINX, Redis, or DCPerf. - Experience in writing micro-benchmarks to measure performance characteristics of a CPU / SoC. - Prior experience developing trace collection tools and using them to trace workloads to feed CPU performance simulators or analytical models. - Experience in OS internals (Windows, Linux, Android), system programming, and compilers (GCC, LLVM, JIT). - Knowledge of the competitive landscape, feature specifications, and industry trends in the server and client domain.
Skills: CPU performance data, workload characterization, performance simulators, computer architecture, competitive performance prediction
This role has been open 137 days — well above the 78-day median for SoC/Chip Architecture roles.
SoC/Chip Architecture · SOC Architecture
|
Open roles in category
473
|
Median days open
78 d
|
Median salary
$239k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Qualcomm | All employers we track in this specialty (473 roles · 67 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 80 | 473 |
| Open roles in the wider Digital Design & Verification family | 423 | 3322 · 115 employers |
| Median days open | 82 d | 78 d (+4 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $239k |
Skills observed across this category: CPU performance data, workload characterization, performance simulators, computer architecture, competitive performance prediction
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm (this employer) · 80 open roles · median 82 d
- NVIDIA · 52 open roles · median 69 d
- Apple · 37 open roles · median 16 d
- AMD · 36 open roles · median 73 d
- Arm Holdings · 27 open roles · median 121 d
- Micron Technology · 21 open roles · median 100 d
How we counted: 473 open SoC/Chip Architecture (SOC Architecture) roles from 67 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 24 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Digital Design & Verification family row. Figures refresh nightly.