Senior Out-of-Order CPU Architect - Texas, Austin, United States
$190,610 - $361,480 USD yearly
Originally posted 19 March 2026 by the employer.
About the role
As a CPU Architect, you will develop and drive end-to-end CPU architecture specifications for high-performance computing and low-power products.
What you'll do
- Define CPU targets for performance, power, frequency, area, and feature content across high-performance computing and extreme low-power applications. - Invent, conceptualize, and specify architectural and microarchitecture features, including defining and documenting new instructions to enhance the instruction set architecture (ISA). - Develop and execute test plans and infrastructure for new architectures and features, simulate functional models, and analyze test results using statistical techniques. - Propose experimental changes and design alternatives to meet constraints for performance, power, area, and timing. - Directly implement microarchitectural specifications in SystemVerilog when needed to aid design teams in converging timing and power constraints. - Collaborate with architects, design, verification, and validation engineers during project execution to drive new microarchitectures and mitigate implementation issues.
What you'll need
- 15+ consecutive years of experience within high performance/high frequency ARM or x86 CPU organizations working in either the design or architectural domain. - 10+ years of experience working within the out-of-order sections of the CPU pipeline, including wide instruction rename and allocation, uop/instruction schedulers, and execution units. - 5+ years writing RTL and owning it through timing and power convergence across multiple generations of a CPU line. - 2+ years of experience building deep, high frequency advanced integer and/or floating-point/vector schedulers. - Deep expertise in CPU architecture fundamentals, microarchitecture design, low-power design, RTL development, and SystemVerilog.
Skills: out-of-order, CPU architecture, microarchitecture, ISA, performance/power targets
This role has been open 214 days — well above the 81-day median for SoC/Chip Architecture roles.
SoC/Chip Architecture · SOC Architecture
|
Open roles in category
472
|
Median days open
81 d
|
Median salary
$240k
|
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 (472 roles · 67 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 12 | 472 |
| Open roles in the wider Digital Design & Verification family | 101 | 3310 · 115 employers |
| Median days open | 53 d | 81 d (−28 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $240k |
Skills observed across this category: out-of-order, CPU architecture, microarchitecture, ISA, performance/power targets
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 80 open roles · median 84 d
- NVIDIA · 54 open roles · median 68 d
- Apple · 37 open roles · median 18 d
- AMD · 36 open roles · median 75 d
- Arm Holdings · 27 open roles · median 123 d
- Micron Technology · 21 open roles · median 102 d
How we counted: 472 open SoC/Chip Architecture (SOC Architecture) roles from 67 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 26 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.