SoC Systems Performance Engineer, Senior Staff
$179,000 - $268,400 USD yearly
Originally posted 4 August 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role focuses on SoC performance analysis for system-on-chip (SoC) products across mobile, automotive, and compute categories.
What you'll do
- Lead and conduct performance and systems studies to define SoC architecture plans.
- Define complex use cases, including new workloads like Gaming and AI, and infer system requirements.
- Deploy simulators, profilers, or hardware to understand performance bottlenecks.
- Provide quantitative justification for architectural changes or tuning.
- Communicate experimental results effectively to technical leads and peers.
- Invent and file patents on technical solutions.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field.
- 5 years System Engineering or related work experience.
- Apply computer architecture knowledge of CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, cache coherency, and virtual memory.
- Hands-on experience in using and modifying simulators and performance/power models, especially full-system models.
- Using code and/or system profiling tools.
- C/C++ programming.
Nice to have
- MS or PhD degree.
- 7 years Systems Engineering or related work experience.
- Industry experience in Computer Architecture concepts like CPU, GPU, DSP, interconnects, shared memory.
- System or chipset development for SoC products, preferably in the mobile market.
- OS principles and HW/SW interaction.
- SoC bus, interconnect, memory technologies, memory controllers, scheduling, MMUs.
- SystemC and event driven simulators.
- VLSI design and verification.
- Pragmatic scripting & automation skills.
- Familiarity with ARM, Linux.
- Familiarity with multimedia or communication technologies including audio codec, video codec, camera, WLAN, LTE and 5G.
Skills: performance bottlenecks, architectural changes, computer architecture, CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, cache coherency, virtual memory
This role has been open 71 days — below the 79-day median for SoC/Chip Architecture roles.
SoC/Chip Architecture · SOC Architecture
|
Open roles in category
472
|
Median days open
79 d
|
Median salary
$238k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Qualcomm | All employers we track in this specialty (472 roles · 65 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 73 | 472 |
| Open roles in the wider Digital Design & Verification family | 381 | 3202 · 115 employers |
| Median days open | 87 d | 79 d (+8 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $238k |
Skills observed across this category: performance bottlenecks, architectural changes, computer architecture, CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, cache coherency, virtual memory
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm (this employer) · 73 open roles · median 88 d
- NVIDIA · 56 open roles · median 71 d
- Apple · 36 open roles · median 12 d
- AMD · 34 open roles · median 60 d
- Arm Holdings · 27 open roles · median 115 d
- Micron Technology · 22 open roles · median 107 d
How we counted: 472 open SoC/Chip Architecture (SOC Architecture) roles from 65 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 18 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.