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Senior Engineer, Architecture & Performance Research Engineer for Data Center and Agentic AI CPU

What You’ll Do

Architecture Research Lab is focused on researching next-generation CPU (RISC-V) microarchitecture and performance for emerging computing workloads. We explore new architectural ideas, evaluate their performance potential, and rapidly turn promising concepts into working designs that can be validated on real silicon. Our research is driven by emerging opportunities in data center and agentic AI workloads, where we investigate how CPU architecture can evolve to meet new performance and efficiency requirements. We also explore CPU-memory co-design from the CPU perspective, in alignment with the broader shift toward memory-centric architectures. A distinctive aspect of our team is the way we approach architecture research. We develop and apply AI-driven methodologies to accelerate architectural exploration, broaden the design space we can investigate, and quickly iterate from ideas to implementation and silicon validation. Rather than simply following established design flows, we continuously seek new ways to explore, evaluate, and realize CPU architectures. The role offers an opportunity to work across the full spectrum of architecture research—from workload and performance analysis, microarchitectural innovation, and architectural modeling to implementation and silicon validation—while helping shape new methodologies for how future CPUs are designed.

Location: Daily onsite presence at our San Jose office in alignment with our Flexible Work policy

Job ID: 43003

As a Senior CPU Architecture & Performance Engineer, you will drive both microarchitectural research and performance modeling for next-generation CPU architectures. You will analyze emerging workloads, develop and refine performance models, identify architectural opportunities, and turn quantitative insights into new microarchitectural concepts. You will work closely with RTL design teams to evaluate, refine, and implement promising ideas, taking them from architectural modeling through RTL and silicon validation. The role offers significant ownership in shaping new CPU architectures and determining which ideas can deliver meaningful performance gains in real hardware.

Collaborate with Staff and Principal Engineers, owning a specific microarchitectural domain from idea proposal through implementation and validation
Participate in design implementation and validation using AI-driven design methodologies
Run architectural simulations and performance models, and analyze results such as IPC, CPI stacks, latency, and throughput
Identify performance bottlenecks and optimization opportunities across the front-end, mid-end, and back-end
Characterize workloads and benchmarks to understand performance behavior and architectural opportunities
Develop scripts and tools to automate and accelerate performance analysis and architectural exploration
Contribute to patents and technical publications based on novel architectural research

What You Bring

Master’s with Computer Architecture, Computer Engineering, or a related field and
3+ years of experience or PhD degree in Computer Architecture, Computer Engineering, or a related field