Sr. Staff CPU Software Test Engineer
$180,600 - $271,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 23 June 2026 by the employer. Relisted by the employer on 27 August 2026.
About the role
As a Sr. Staff CPU Software Test Engineer, you will design, develop, and validate embedded and cloud edge software and automated test suites across functional, integration, and system levels. You will collaborate with systems, hardware, architecture, and test teams to ensure production-level software readiness, workload performance, and platform compliance.
What you'll do
- Create software and firmware test plans addressing requirements traceability matrices and test coverage relative to feature specifications. - Design, develop, execute, and maintain automated software and firmware test suites to verify quality and compliance at functional, integration, and system levels. - Manually test customer installation and deployment experiences across mobile, compute, and automotive environments where appropriate. - Support continuous integration and continuous deployment processes within quality and release engineering. - Implement customer use cases, workload analysis models, and workload generation while collaborating on bring-up, debug, and diagnostics. - Validate operating systems and customer usage environments to evaluate and optimize power and performance.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or a related field with 6+ years of software engineering experience (or Master's with 5+ years, or PhD with 4+ years). - 3+ years of experience with programming languages such as C, C++, Java, or Python. - Demonstrated background in software and firmware test automation techniques. - Experience with test coverage, requirements traceability, and system-level validation.
Nice to have
- 8 years of experience in software/firmware validation, with at least 5 years focused on data center servers. - Extensive experience working with operating systems such as Ubuntu Server, RHEL, SUSE, or Windows Server. - Strong programming skills in C and/or Python. - Experience developing automated test cases for server platforms supporting bring-up and production software releases. - Prior experience with software/firmware integration across BIOS/UEFI, BMC firmware, and operating systems for x86, ARM64, or RISC-V 64-bit server platforms. - Understanding of server firmware standards, open-source implementations, and specifications for ARM64-based servers.
Skills: software test plans, automated test suites, operating systems, server platforms, BIOS/UEFI, BMC firmware
This role has been open 120 days — well above the 62-day median for Systems Software Engineering roles.
Systems Software Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
698
|
Median days open
62 d
|
Median salary
$209k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Qualcomm | All employers we track in this specialty (698 roles · 73 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 175 | 698 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 734 | 6298 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 83 d | 62 d (+21 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $209k |
Skills observed across this category: software test plans, automated test suites, operating systems, server platforms, BIOS/UEFI, BMC firmware
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm (this employer) · 174 open roles · median 79 d
- NVIDIA · 136 open roles · median 43 d
- AMD · 62 open roles · median 51 d
- Broadcom · 22 open roles · median 58 d
- Mobileye · 21 open roles · median 91 d
- Arm Holdings · 20 open roles · median 119 d
How we counted: 698 open Systems Software Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 73 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 Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.