Sr. Staff Engineer, IP Runtime - Austin, Texas, United States
$100,000 - $500,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 9 October 2026 by the employer.
This role focuses on Tenstorrent's custom processor, accelerator, memory, and data-movement IP.
About the role
This role involves working at the hardware/software boundary to define how hardware blocks are initialized, coordinated, and used by the runtime, and determining how workloads are dispatched, scheduled, synchronized, and executed across the accelerator. The work focuses on Tenstorrent's custom processor, accelerator, memory, and data-movement IP.
What you'll do
- Define the runtime architecture and implementation that controls execution, scheduling, synchronization, and resource management.
- Build low-level runtime components that initialize hardware IP, dispatch work to processor and accelerator engines, coordinate dependencies, and manage resources.
- Design runtime interfaces and data-movement paths that make memory access, synchronization, and execution efficient and predictable.
- Analyze bottlenecks across the runtime and hardware/software stack, then drive improvements in latency, throughput, scalability, and reliability.
- Translate real-world workload needs into runtime improvements while remaining hands-on with design, coding, performance analysis, bring-up, and debugging.
What you'll need
- Expert C or C++ engineer with a track record of designing and delivering complex, performance-critical systems.
- Experience working close to hardware in low-level, embedded, bare-metal, or accelerator environments.
- Experience translating hardware specifications into reliable software behavior.
- Strong in runtime fundamentals, including command execution, scheduling, synchronization, memory movement, resource management, and parallelism.
- Skilled at debugging and optimizing systems end-to-end, especially at the hardware/software boundary.
- Technical leader who collaborates effectively across hardware, firmware, compiler, and systems teams and mentors other engineers.
This role has been open 0 days — well below the 59-day median for Systems Software Engineering roles.
Systems Software Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
683
|
Median days open
59 d
|
Median salary
$213k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Tenstorrent | All employers we track in this specialty (683 roles · 73 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 6 | 683 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 28 | 6035 · 146 employers |
| Median days open | 125 d | 59 d (+66 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $213k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 169 open roles · median 74 d
- NVIDIA · 128 open roles · median 51 d
- AMD · 59 open roles · median 50 d
- Mobileye · 29 open roles · median 73 d
- Broadcom · 22 open roles · median 45 d
- Arm Holdings · 20 open roles · median 107 d
How we counted: 683 open Systems Software Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 73 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 10 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.