Principal System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer
Develop specialized diagnostic software and stress tools targeting CPU, memory, interconnect, and PCIe across Arm-based AI SoCs.
Originally posted 2 November 2026 by the employer.
About the role
The Principal System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer develops, extends, and integrates specialized silicon validation and diagnostics tools for AI SoCs. This role focuses on developing diagnostic software and stress tools that expose hardware failures, characterize silicon behavior, and improve platform observability across bring-up and validation.
What you'll do
- Learn and extend existing Arm diagnostics tools to support Graphcore's AI platform.
- Develop specialized diagnostics and stress-testing software for CPU, memory, interconnect, PCIe, and other system components.
- Build reusable validation utilities that integrate into the existing validation framework.
- Develop tools that expose intermittent hardware failures, including silent data corruption, timing-related issues, and hardware instability.
- Design configurable, configuration-driven diagnostic applications supporting scalable parameterization, multiple silicon revisions, and execution environments.
- Debug low-level hardware, firmware, operating system, and driver interactions across server and rack-scale validation environments.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Strong experience developing hardware diagnostics, system validation software, firmware validation tools, or low-level systems software.
- Strong software development skills in Python and C/C++.
- Strong Linux systems experience and expertise debugging hardware/software interactions across multiple layers of modern server platforms.
- Strong understanding of modern server platform architecture, including how CPU, memory, PCIe, storage, networking, firmware, operating system, and device drivers interact.
- Experience with server platforms, embedded systems, or SoC validation.
Nice to have
- Experience with Arm-based server platforms, AI accelerators, or high-performance computing systems.
- Experience with silent data corruption (SDC) testing, hardware stress testing, power transient analysis, and hardware fault injection methodologies.
- Experience with firmware validation, silicon bring-up, performance characterization, hardware telemetry, BMC firmware, or RAS technologies.
- Subsystem validation experience across CPU scaling, memory (DDR/HBM) bandwidth and latency, interconnect contention, and PCIe or high-speed I/O.
More semiconductor jobs: Silicon validation jobs · Austin jobs
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 40-day median for Post-Silicon Validation roles.
Post-Silicon Validation · Silicon Validation
|
Open roles in category
438
|
Median days open
40 d
|
Category median salary (all employers)
$167k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Graphcore | All employers we track in this specialty (438 roles · 62 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 19 | 438 |
| Open roles in the wider Silicon Validation & Test family | 43 | 2324 · 111 employers |
| Median days open | 138 d | 40 d (+98 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $167k |
Who's hiring in this category
- AMD · 58 open roles · median 48 d
- Qualcomm · 37 open roles · median 32 d
- Micron Technology · 31 open roles · median 41 d
- NVIDIA · 24 open roles · median 35 d
- Microchip Technology · 23 open roles · median 80 d
- Apple · 20 open roles · median 11 d
How we counted: 438 open Post-Silicon Validation (Silicon Validation) roles from 62 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 3 Nov 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 Silicon Validation & Test family row. Figures refresh nightly.