Senior CPU Silicon Analysis Engineer - Oregon, Hillsboro, United States
$190,610 - $269,100 USD yearly
Originally posted 2 October 2026 by the employer.
This role focuses on in-depth studies of CPU designs.
About the role
As a Senior CPU Silicon Analysis Engineer, you will conduct in-depth studies of CPU designs to provide critical data-driven guidance for future CPU roadmap decisions. This involves owning silicon bring-up, maintenance, and comprehensive measurements to characterize processor behavior.
What you'll do
- Own and operate lab infrastructure for systematic silicon characterization, including bring-up, maintenance, and debug of pre-production and production platforms.
- Plan and execute measurements across metrics including performance, IPC, power, dynamic capacitance, leakage, and voltage-frequency curves.
- Design and execute structured measurement campaigns to characterize silicon behavior under various operating conditions and thermal/power envelopes.
- Analyze and interpret silicon data to identify power/performance gaps, anomalies, and opportunities relative to architectural expectations.
- Collaborate with architecture, benchmarking, backend design, and simulation teams to correlate lab results with pre-silicon models and drive root cause analysis.
- Develop tooling, scripts, and automation to streamline data collection, processing, and reporting pipelines.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related discipline with 8+ years of relevant industry experience, OR a Master's Degree in a related discipline with 6+ years of relevant industry experience.
- Hands-on experience with silicon lab environments, including platform bring-up, debug, and instrumentation.
- Experience collecting and analyzing silicon power and performance metrics such as IPC, Frequency, Cdyn, leakage, and microarchitectural telemetries.
- Proficiency in scripting languages (Python, Bash, or similar) for test automation and data analysis.
- Strong analytical skills and ability to draw conclusions from complex, multi-dimensional silicon data sets.
Nice to have
- Experience characterizing CPU silicon across a range of designs and operating conditions.
- Familiarity with EMON/PMU-based performance profiling and OS-level performance tooling.
- Understanding of CPU microarchitecture sufficient to interpret performance counter data and correlate measurements to architectural behavior.
- Exposure to backend design concepts such as voltage-frequency corner selection, leakage-frequency tradeoffs, and process library characteristics.
- Experience with RTL simulation or pre-silicon performance modeling and correlation workflows.
- Background in silicon-based benchmarking and performance characterization of processor designs.
Skills: silicon bring-up, CPU characterization, power, performance, IPC, lab infrastructure, data analysis
This role has been open 13 days — well below the 41-day median for Post-Silicon Validation roles.
Post-Silicon Validation · Silicon Validation
|
Open roles in category
410
|
Median days open
41 d
|
Median salary
$167k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Intel Corporation | All employers we track in this specialty (410 roles · 61 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 11 | 410 |
| Open roles in the wider Silicon Validation & Test family | 24 | 2220 · 112 employers |
| Median days open | 11 d | 41 d (−30 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $167k |
Skills observed across this category: silicon bring-up, CPU characterization, power, performance, IPC, lab infrastructure, data analysis
Who's hiring in this category
- AMD · 59 open roles · median 41 d
- Micron Technology · 39 open roles · median 38 d
- Qualcomm · 36 open roles · median 30 d
- NVIDIA · 25 open roles · median 23 d
- Microchip Technology · 21 open roles · median 71 d
- Graphcore · 20 open roles · median 120 d
How we counted: 410 open Post-Silicon Validation (Silicon Validation) roles from 61 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 16 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 Silicon Validation & Test family row. Figures refresh nightly.