Senior Silicon Product Definition Engineer - CA, Santa Clara, United States
$196,000 - $310,500 USD yearly
Originally posted 10 September 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role involves defining product configurations and driving optimization from early bring-up through production by analyzing complex silicon and system data to maximize performance, power efficiency, yield, and quality. You will connect silicon behavior, platform requirements, market needs, and manufacturing realities to determine how products are productized.
What you'll do
- Own product-definition analysis across performance, power, yield, and quality, using large silicon datasets.
- Drive product-specific configurations by isolating frequency-power and thermal-limiting constraints and translating findings into silicon, firmware, BIOS, driver, and platform changes.
- Build statistical models, automation, and visualization workflows that improve decision quality.
- Partner with Tools and Methodology teams to left-shift data modeling, test procedures, and closed-loop analysis infrastructure.
- Lead multi-functional root-cause closure with architecture, design, validation, software/firmware, applications engineering, manufacturing, and operations teams.
- Evaluate performance-per-watt, process-voltage-temperature behavior, yield, and quality trade-offs, and drive productized fixes.
What you'll need
- BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
- 8+ years of experience in silicon product definition, post-silicon characterization, product engineering, or performance and power analysis for GPU, CPU, or SoC products.
- Hands-on experience with silicon bring-up, performance-per-watt analysis, optimization across process, voltage, and temperature conditions.
- Strong programming and data-analysis skills using Python and one or more of Perl, JMP, SQL, with practical knowledge of statistics and large-dataset manipulation.
- Strong technical foundation in digital design, circuit analysis, computer architecture, critical-path analysis, process technology, and transistor/device physics.
- Working knowledge of the system stack, including firmware, BIOS, drivers, operating-system behavior, and software applications.
Skills: silicon product definition, post-silicon characterization, performance-per-watt, process-voltage-temperature, firmware, BIOS
This role has been open 34 days — well below the 55-day median for Product Engineering roles.
Product Engineering · Silicon Validation
|
Open roles in category
38
|
Median days open
55 d
|
Median salary
—
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | NVIDIA | All employers we track in this specialty (38 roles · 18 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 5 | 38 |
| Open roles in the wider Silicon Validation & Test family | 95 | 2224 · 112 employers |
| Median days open | 27 d | 55 d (−28 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | — |
Skills observed across this category: silicon product definition, post-silicon characterization, performance-per-watt, process-voltage-temperature, firmware, BIOS
Who's hiring in this category
- AMD · 7 open roles · median 55 d
- NVIDIA (this employer) · 5 open roles · median 27 d
- Qualcomm · 4 open roles · median 51 d
- onsemi · 3 open roles · median 126 d
- Arm Holdings · 2 open roles · median 84 d
- Microchip Technology · 2 open roles · median 158 d
How we counted: 38 open Product Engineering (Silicon Validation) roles from 18 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 15 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.