Performance Engineer, Staff - Austin, Texas, United States of America, United States
$160,200 - $240,200 USD yearly
Originally posted 27 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role focuses on deep root cause analysis of complex issues spanning applications, middleware, RTOS, firmware, drivers, and hardware platforms. You will isolate problems across the full software and hardware stack, addressing performance bottlenecks, system crashes, and silicon defects within the DSP Architecture and Design group.
What you'll do
- Lead root cause analysis across applications, middleware, RTOS, drivers, firmware, and hardware for crashes, hangs, lockups, watchdog resets, and memory corruption. - Analyze application failures using logs, traces, profiling tools, and debuggers, investigating multithreading synchronization errors, resource leaks, deadlocks, and race conditions. - Debug RTOS and operating system scheduler, interrupt, memory management, and timer issues, analyzing latency, jitter, missed deadlines, task starvation, and priority inversion. - Isolate processor, cache, memory subsystem, DMA engine, and interconnect issues using JTAG, trace systems, protocol analyzers, oscilloscopes, and logic analyzers. - Profile applications and system software to identify bottlenecks across CPU utilization, memory bandwidth, cache efficiency, and interrupt load. - Develop diagnostic tools, instrumentation, and automation to enhance system visibility and support performance investigations.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field with 4+ years of relevant experience (or Master's with 3+ years, or PhD with 2+ years). - 2+ years of experience with high-performance microprocessor design. - Extensive experience debugging embedded and real-time systems. - Expert knowledge of C/C++. - Strong understanding of operating systems, RTOS internals, device drivers, firmware, processor architecture, memory systems, and interrupt architectures. - Experience with application debugging tools, profilers, crash analysis tools, tracing infrastructure, multithreading, synchronization, and memory management.
Nice to have
- Experience with Qualcomm SoCs, DSPs, NPUs, or mobile computing platforms. - Experience with Linux, Android, QNX, FreeRTOS, ThreadX, or Zephyr. - Knowledge of ARM architecture, GIC, cache coherency, DMA, and virtualization technologies. - Experience with performance analysis, power optimization, and silicon bring-up. - Development of custom debug and telemetry tools, as well as Python or scripting experience for automation.
Skills: RTOS, Linux, Kernel, C/C++, JTAG, Debug
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 68-day median for Systems Software Engineering roles.
Systems Software Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
672
|
Median days open
68 d
|
Median salary
$213k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Qualcomm | All employers we track in this specialty (672 roles · 71 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 172 | 672 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 725 | 6305 · 146 employers |
| Median days open | 85 d | 68 d (+17 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $213k |
Skills observed across this category: RTOS, Linux, Kernel, C/C++, JTAG, Debug
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm (this employer) · 171 open roles · median 89 d
- NVIDIA · 134 open roles · median 43 d
- AMD · 58 open roles · median 55 d
- Mobileye · 25 open roles · median 91 d
- Arm Holdings · 20 open roles · median 125 d
- Broadcom · 16 open roles · median 64 d
How we counted: 672 open Systems Software Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 71 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 28 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 Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.