CPU Verification Engineer Design Verification Austin/Santa Clara/Markham · Hybrid
Listed on 2026-10-05
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Engineering
Test Engineer, Hardware Engineer
Nuvacore is building a ground-up high performance, low-power CPU for next-generation compute workloads. We are seeking Verification Engineers at multiple levels — from Senior Engineer to Principal level — to help prove the correctness of the Nuvacore CPU. As part of the design verification (DV) team
, you will help verify by building the test plans, environments, and checkers that find deep bugs in the pipeline long before silicon, working shoulder-to-shoulder with architecture and RTL design.
Plan & Strategy: Drive the verification scope, strategy, and test plans for the CPU at unit and/or top level of the CPU design.
Environment Setup: Build, maintain, and scale robust verification environments — stimulus generators, checkers, transactors, and coverage — that exercise the pipeline end to end.
Test & Debug: Generate complex directed and random tests in assembly, C, or random instruction sequences (RIS) to expose corner cases such as speculation, hazards, flushes, and retirement ordering.
Performance Verification: Partner with architects to correlate RTL against performance models, hunting throughput, stall, and branch-prediction-accuracy issues.
Coverage Closure: Define the coverage space, write functional coverage monitors, and analyze metrics to prove the test plan is complete.
Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner with architecture and RTL teams to root-cause failures, drive design fixes, and support emulation, FPGA, and silicon bring-up.
REQUIREMENTS — MUST HAVEDegree in Electrical/Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
15+ years (Principal) or 4+ years (Senior Engineer) of design-verification experience, ideally on a CPU or complex digital design.
Strong knowledge of CPU micro-architecture and digital logic — pipelines, out-of-order execution, and branch prediction.
Hands-on functional verification: test plans, test benches, checkers, transactors, and coverage.
Proficiency in C/C++ and/or System Verilog, plus a scripting language (Python; Perl a plus).
Experience writing and debugging tests in assembly for CPU verification.
REQUIREMENTS — NICE TO HAVEExperience on one or more of Front-end / execution-unit verification, load/store cache verification, SoC/System verification, Debug/Power mgmt verification.
Random instruction sequence (RIS) stimulus generation.
Constrained-random verification and coverage-driven closure.
Assertions and formal verification.
Emulation/FPGA and silicon bring-up and debug (waveforms, trace).
Driving a verification problem end-to-end to sign-off.
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