System Performance Engineer, Staff
$148,300 - $222,500 USD yearly
Originally posted 30 April 2026 by the employer.
Optimize power, performance, and thermal behavior for Qualcomm Snapdragon Chipsets across Mobile, Compute, Automotive, and IoT platforms.
About the role
Qualcomm's System Performance Team is responsible for optimizing and validating performance for Qualcomm Snapdragon Chipsets across Mobile, Compute, Automotive, and IoT business units. In this role, you will collaborate with software, hardware, and architecture teams to optimize power, performance, and thermal behavior across complex concurrent system use-cases.
What you'll do
- Enable, profile, and analyze complex concurrent system use-cases in emulation and software environments including Android, Linux, and Windows. - Define and document performance and power analysis plans across CPU, GPU, and AI/ML workloads and concurrent scenarios. - Identify SoC performance optimization opportunities across software and hardware architectures, and direct root-cause triage for complex issues. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to implement optimal power, performance, and thermal solutions. - Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, and define automation to improve operational efficiency. - Prepare technical reports and recommendations for product teams and senior executives to support architecture choices.
What you'll need
- Experience researching, simulating, or validating systems-level performance, architecture, software, or hardware. - Practical experience analyzing complex concurrent system use-cases across software environments (Android, Linux, or Windows) or emulation. - Background in power, performance, and thermal analysis across multi-workload scenarios such as CPU, GPU, or AI/ML. - Experience delivering technical guidance, issue triage, and root-cause analysis for system performance.
Nice to have
- Master's degree in Computer Engineering. - 4 years of practical post-silicon experience in power and performance analysis of complex SoCs. - 4 years of work experience in a role requiring interaction with senior leadership (Sr. Director, Vice President level and above). - Programming and scripting experience with Python or C/C++. - Understanding of memory hierarchy, system interconnects, and ARM SoC specifications such as SMMU, GIC, CoreSight-PMU, and bus interface protocols. - Knowledge of ARM v8 and ARM v9 specifications, software power management stacks, or graphics APIs such as Vulkan, OpenGL, DX12, or CUDA.
Skills: Snapdragon Chipsets, optimize power, performance, and thermal, complex concurrent system use-cases, performance and power analysis plans, architecture choices
This role has been open 177 days — well above the 79-day median for SoC/Chip Architecture roles.
SoC/Chip Architecture · SOC Architecture
|
Open roles in category
477
|
Median days open
79 d
|
Median salary
$239k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Qualcomm | All employers we track in this specialty (477 roles · 67 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 80 | 477 |
| Open roles in the wider Digital Design & Verification family | 424 | 3328 · 115 employers |
| Median days open | 83 d | 79 d (+4 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $239k |
Skills observed across this category: Snapdragon Chipsets, optimize power, performance, and thermal, complex concurrent system use-cases, performance and power analysis plans, architecture choices
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm (this employer) · 80 open roles · median 83 d
- NVIDIA · 56 open roles · median 67 d
- Apple · 37 open roles · median 17 d
- AMD · 36 open roles · median 74 d
- Arm Holdings · 27 open roles · median 122 d
- Micron Technology · 21 open roles · median 101 d
How we counted: 477 open SoC/Chip Architecture (SOC Architecture) roles from 67 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 25 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.