Validation Chief of Staff

Graphcore is seeking a Validation Chief of Staff to support strategic execution, operational coordination, and cross-functional alignment across the validation organisation.

The Validation Chief of Staff will partner closely with validation leadership, program management, architecture, silicon, firmware, software, and systems engineering teams to improve operational efficiency, manage critical initiatives, and help scale validation processes, infrastructure, and team effectiveness across global sites.

Responsibilities and Duties:

• Partner with validation leadership to coordinate execution across multiple validation and bring-up initiatives
• Drive organisational planning, prioritisation, and operational tracking across validation programs and milestones
• Improve visibility of project status, technical risks, dependencies, and execution readiness across teams
• Coordinate cross-functional activities between validation, architecture, silicon, firmware, software, and systems engineering teams
• Support leadership reviews, engineering readiness assessments, and validation status reporting
• Help define and improve operational processes, engineering workflows, and communication structures across the validation organisation
• Track key validation metrics, milestones, and deliverables to support organisational execution and decision-making
• Support escalation management and coordination of complex technical issues across teams
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives related to validation infrastructure, engineering processes, and operational efficiency
• Organise and coordinate technical reviews, planning discussions, and cross-site engineering meetings
• Contribute to development of scalable documentation, reporting frameworks, and operational tooling
• Work with engineering leadership to identify resource constraints, prioritisation conflicts, and execution risks
• Facilitate collaboration across geographically distributed engineering teams and stakeholders
• Support onboarding and organisational scaling activities across the validation organisation
• Provide structured analysis and recommendations to leadership to support strategic and operational decision-making

Essential skills:

• Strong experience working within silicon validation, post-silicon bring-up, system validation, or related engineering environments
• Strong understanding of hardware and software development lifecycles for complex SoC or platform products
• Experience coordinating cross-functional engineering activities across multiple technical disciplines
• Excellent organisational, planning, and operational coordination skills
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities with the ability to manage complex technical and organisational dependencies
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills across multidisciplinary engineering organisations
• Experience creating structured reporting, tracking, and operational review mechanisms
• Ability to work effectively across geographically distributed teams and stakeholders
• Strong attention to detail with the ability to manage multiple priorities simultaneously
• Experience using collaboration, reporting, and project tracking tools within engineering environments
• Ability to operate independently in fast-moving and technically complex environments
• Strong Linux and Python familiarity within engineering workflows and validation environments