Sr Staff CPU Server Physical Design Engineer
$209,300 - $313,900 USD yearly
Originally posted 21 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
As a CPU Engineer at Qualcomm, you will work on Central Processing Unit (CPU) design efforts, collaborating with cross-functional teams to design, verify, and implement multi-core CPU operations.
What you'll do
- Apply knowledge of computer architecture, micro-architecture, logic design, circuits, and physical design to develop and verify high performance and low power CPU designs.
- Identify and resolve complex problems to ensure design completeness, functionality, power, and performance.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to establish requirements, specifications, and trade-offs across performance, power, and cost.
- Evaluate the CPU design process across feasibility, pre-silicon design and verification, and post-silicon validation.
- Write technical documentation including feature descriptions, architectural descriptions, verification test plans, and implementation details, while reviewing documentation of junior engineers.
- Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other engineering team members.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field and 6+ years of hardware engineering, software engineering, systems engineering, or related work experience (or Master's degree and 5+ years, or PhD and 4+ years).
- Experience in hardware engineering, electrical engineering, or related technical disciplines.
Nice to have
- Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field.
- 10 years of work experience with high-performance microprocessor design.
- 10 years of work experience with high level programming (C, C++) and scripting languages (Perl, Python).
- 10 years of work experience with simulators and waveform debugging tools (Verilog, VHDL).
- 10 years of work experience with industry standard tools for synthesis, place and/or route, and design verification.
- 10 years of work experience with simulation, emulation, formal verification, or silicon validation.
- 10 years of experience creating functional models, checkers, test plans, and test generation.
- 3 years of experience working in a large matrixed organization and 1 year of experience interacting with senior leadership (Director level and above).
Skills: Physical Design, synthesis, place and route, CPU design, timing
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 62-day median for Physical Design roles.
Physical Design · Physical Design
|
Open roles in category
664
|
Median days open
62 d
|
Median salary
$185k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Qualcomm | All employers we track in this specialty (664 roles · 79 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 122 | 664 |
| Open roles in the wider Physical Implementation family | 167 | 1489 · 110 employers |
| Median days open | 45 d | 62 d (−17 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $185k |
Skills observed across this category: Physical Design, synthesis, place and route, CPU design, timing
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm (this employer) · 119 open roles · median 45 d
- AMD · 61 open roles · median 27 d
- Intel Corporation · 40 open roles · median 15 d
- NVIDIA · 38 open roles · median 67 d
- Synopsys · 38 open roles · median 36 d
- Broadcom · 35 open roles · median 101 d
How we counted: 664 open Physical Design (Physical Design) roles from 79 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 22 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 Physical Implementation family row. Figures refresh nightly.