Senior System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer

Job Description

Graphcore is seeking a highly skilled System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer to develop, extend, and integrate specialized silicon validation and diagnostics tools for next-generation AI SoCs.

Responsibilities and Duties

The successful candidate will work with existing Arm-developed diagnostics technologies and extend them to support Graphcore's next-generation AI silicon. They will be responsible for developing system-level diagnostics and stress tools that integrate with an existing framework to detect data integrity, computational correctness, performance, and reliability issues across CPUs, AI accelerators, memory, storage, PCIe, firmware, BMC, and other platform components.

Key responsibilities include:

• Learning and extending existing Arm diagnostics tools to support Graphcore's AI platform.
• Developing specialized diagnostics and stress-testing software for CPU, memory, interconnect, PCIe, and other system components.
• Building reusable validation utilities that integrate into the existing validation framework.
• Developing tools that expose intermittent hardware failures, including silent data corruption, timing-related issues, and hardware instability.
• Designing configurable diagnostic applications supporting multiple silicon revisions, platforms, and execution environments.
• Developing automation for executing diagnostics across server and rack-scale validation environments.
• Designing configuration-driven diagnostics supporting scalable parameterization and workload variation.
• Collaborating with hardware architects to understand new hardware capabilities and identify missing diagnostics.
• Working closely with firmware and validation teams to improve hardware observability.
• Debugging low-level hardware, firmware, operating system, and driver interactions.
• Analyzing diagnostic output and improving fault isolation methodologies.
• Developing software that enables engineers to reproduce and investigate difficult hardware failures.
• Contributing reusable libraries and utilities that improve engineering productivity across multiple validation teams.

Candidate Profile

Essential

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Experience developing hardware diagnostics, system validation software, firmware validation tools, or low-level systems software.
• Strong software development skills in Python and C/C++.
• Strong Linux systems experience.
• Strong understanding of modern server platform architecture, including how CPU, memory, PCIe, storage, networking, firmware, operating system, and device drivers interact within a complete system.
• Experience debugging hardware/software interactions across multiple layers of the platform.
• Experience developing diagnostics, stress testing, or hardware validation software.
• Experience with server platforms, embedded systems, or SoC validation.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills.
• Experience collaborating across hardware, firmware, software, and validation teams.
• Excellent communication and problem-solving skills.

Desirable

• Experience with Arm-based server platforms.
• Knowledge of AI accelerators or high-performance computing systems.
• Familiarity with Silent Data Corruption (SDC) testing.
• Experience with hardware stress testing.
• Understanding of power transient analysis.
• Knowledge of hardware fault injection methodologies.
• Experience with firmware validation.
• Familiarity with silicon bring-up.
• Experience with performance characterization.
• Knowledge of hardware telemetry and observability.
• Familiarity with BMC firmware or server management.
• Understanding of RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) technologies.

What Success Looks Like

Successful candidates will:

• Extend existing diagnostics technologies to support new Graphcore hardware.
• Develop new diagnostics tools for emerging hardware capabilities.
• Build reusable software components that integrate seamlessly with the existing validation framework.
• Improve hardware observability and root-cause isolation.
• Detect and characterize intermittent hardware failures that traditional validation techniques cannot expose.
• Deliver configurable diagnostics that scale across multiple platforms and silicon revisions.
• Work effectively across hardware, firmware, validation, and diagnostics teams to continuously improve platform quality.

Why Join Graphcore?

This role provides a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of hardware architecture, diagnostics, and software engineering while helping define how next-generation AI systems are validated. Rather than maintaining an existing validation framework, you will develop the specialized diagnostics and stress tools that make that framework valuable. Your work will directly influence hardware quality, silicon bring-up, and long-term platform reliability for future AI infrastructure.

Benefits

In addition to a competitive salary, Graphcore offers flexible working and a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your health, wellbeing and financial future. Our benefits include medical, dental and vision coverage, Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), disability and life insurance, a 401(k) retirement plan, commuter benefits, wellness services and an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP).