Staff CPU Architecture & Performance Research Engineer

Responsibilities

• Own performance analysis for CPU microarchitectural domains including frontend, execution engine, and memory subsystem
• Build, extend, and validate architectural performance models and simulators
• Perform CPI/IPC breakdowns and root-cause performance bottlenecks
• Evaluate microarchitectural features using trace-driven, analytical, and cycle-accurate models
• Characterize workloads and benchmarks such as SPEC, server, client, and AI/ML
• Translate performance data into clear architectural recommendations
• Contribute to patents and publications

Requirements

• Master’s in Computer Engineering or Computer Science with 8+ years of experience, or PhD with 5+ years of experience
• 5+ years of experience in CPU microarchitecture or performance engineering
• Experience with RISC-V, ARM, or X86 architectures
• Deep understanding of out-of-order execution, branch prediction, pipelines, and speculation
• Knowledge of cache coherence, memory systems, prefetching, and NUMA effects
• Hands-on experience with architectural simulators like gem5
• Strong programming skills in C/C++ and Python
• Experience analyzing large performance datasets and traces
• Familiarity with compiler optimizations and hardware/software co-design
• Proven prior tapeout experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in power/performance/area (PPA) trade-off analysis
• Experience with SIMD, Vectors, or VME for AI inference workloads
• Prior leadership experience guiding junior engineers
• Prior patent or publication experience