Senior Power and Performance Engineer - CA, Santa Clara, United States
Originally posted 23 September 2026 by the employer.
About the role
You will design, implement, and productize the power-performance and thermal-control mechanisms that ship inside GPU, CPU, and SoC products. The role operates within NVIDIA's Silicon Co-Design Group (SCG) at the seam where silicon, firmware, platform, and software meet.
What you'll do
- Design, implement, and tune silicon power and thermal controllers in partnership with firmware, hardware, software, and design/power-architecture teams from spec through productization. - Drive debug and resolution of power-limiting constraints, delivering product-specific customizations that balance performance and the thermal envelope. - Deliver system-level power optimizations spanning silicon, platform, software, and manufacturing for datacenter accelerators to low-power client devices. - Partner with the SCG Tools team to left-shift modeling, analysis, and test infrastructure, bringing closed-loop techniques into production. - Validate silicon power and thermal features across multi-functional teams from bring-up through production silicon, owning WARs and productized fixes through confirmation. - Translate power, thermal, and performance signals into decision-ready options for POR, binning, and program-impacting risks alongside system architects, chip and board designers, and ATE engineers.
What you'll need
- BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience). - 6+ years implementing power and thermal controllers in firmware for GPU, CPU, or SoC products. - Hands-on experience with system-level silicon bring-up and validation, DVFS, power characterization and modeling, performance analysis, and perf-per-watt optimization. - Background in implementing system-level features, thermal policies, and data-analysis and statistics workflows. - Solid understanding of digital design, circuit analysis, CPU/GPU/SoC architecture, PTPX, advanced process technologies, and transistor/device physics. - Demonstrated experience operating across globally distributed and offshore engineering teams.
This role has been open 132 days — well above the 51-day median for Hardware Systems Engineering roles.
Hardware Systems Engineering · AI ML Hardware
|
Open roles in category
1011
|
Median days open
51 d
|
Median salary
$155k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | NVIDIA | All employers we track in this specialty (1011 roles · 103 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 51 | 1011 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 995 | 6298 · 144 employers |
| Median days open | 67 d | 51 d (+16 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $155k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Intel Corporation · 74 open roles · median 35 d
- KLA Corporation · 63 open roles · median 49 d
- Teradyne · 60 open roles · median 35 d
- NVIDIA (this employer) · 52 open roles · median 70 d
- Applied Materials · 49 open roles · median 70 d
- AMD · 45 open roles · median 52 d
How we counted: 1011 open Hardware Systems Engineering (AI ML Hardware) roles from 103 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 23 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.