Description
Job Summary
Reporting to senior leadership within Architecture and Validation, the Debug Validation Engineer will drive post-silicon debug and validation activities for next-generation AI compute silicon and systems.
The role is responsible for leading teams focused on identifying, reproducing, analysing and resolving complex silicon, firmware and system-level issues during bring-up, characterization and product readiness.
This position combines deep technical debugging expertise with strong cross-functional collaboration across multiple engineering disciplines.
Responsibilities and Duties
- Lead post-silicon debug and validation activities for AI compute silicon and platform technologies
- Contribute to debug and validation activities across multiple projects and milestones
- Drive prioritisation, planning and execution of debug and validation activities across multiple projects and milestones
- Investigate and resolve complex silicon, firmware, software and system-level issues during bring-up and validation
- Develop structured debug methodologies and failure analysis processes to improve issue resolution efficiency
- Collaborate closely with architecture, RTL, firmware, software and systems engineering teams to identify root causes and implement corrective actions
- Drive debug of CPU, memory, interconnect and high-speed I/O subsystems under functional, stress and workload conditions
- Develop and enhance automated debug, regression and validation infrastructure using Python and related technologies
- Analyse logs, traces, telemetry and hardware data to isolate and characterize system failures and performance issues
- Support development of validation tests, debug tooling and custom diagnostics to improve coverage and observability
- Define validation metrics, debug workflows and reporting standards to ensure consistent and repeatable analysis
- Drive continuous improvement of debug processes, validation methodologies and engineering workflows
- Communicate technical risks, status and recommendations clearly to engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders
- Support silicon readiness reviews and contribute to product quality and release decisions
- Contribute to continuous improvement of debug methodologies, validation infrastructure and engineering workflows
Candidate Profile
Essential:
- Strong experience in bare metal environments
- Good knowledge of SoC and platform architectures
- Expertise in debug infrastructure and post-silicon debug methodologies
- Strong programming skills in Python, C, or debug scripting languages such as CMM
- Highly motivated self-starter with a collaborative and team-oriented approach
- Ability to work across teams and programming languages to identify root causes of deep and complex issues
- Experience of the post-silicon validation process applied in digital ASIC environments
- Strong Linux and Python experience
- Exceptional communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively to solve complex problems
- Excellent problem-solving, analytical and diagnostic skills
- Deep knowledge of scan, DFT, JTAG and trace infrastructure
- Strong debug skills including fault tree analysis, failure isolation, fishbone methodologies and system-level debug techniques
- Ability to work independently on technically complex debug and validation activities across hardware, firmware and software domains
Desirable
- Understanding of DFT flows from insertion through post-silicon validation
- Experience developing tooling for parsing and analysing debug data, including scan dump parsing
- Driver-level experience with one or more of the following technologies: PCIe, Ethernet, Memory technologies including LPDDR, DDR and HBM, Peripheral interfaces such as I2C, I3C and SPI
- Experience using CoreSight and similar debug infrastructure including CTI, ETx, DStream, JLink, Lauterbach, ATB and STM
- Good knowledge of mixed-signal building blocks such as PLLs, high-speed PHYs and IC control/communication protocols
- Experience with Arm CPU architectures, system IP and associated debug tooling
- Experience with AMBA protocols
- Understanding of ML applications and associated workloads
- Experience in characterization, failure analysis, test development, statistical analysis and customer support