Performance Engineer, Staff

Qualcomm • Austin, TX

1d • $160,200 - $240,200

About The Position

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. is seeking an experienced systems debug engineer for its DSP Architecture and Design group. The role investigates and resolves complex issues across applications, middleware, RTOS, firmware, drivers, and hardware platforms, conducting deep root cause analysis of problems spanning the software and hardware stack. Issues may include application failures, performance bottlenecks, silicon defects, and system architecture problems.

The successful candidate is an expert in debugging complex embedded systems and can isolate faults wherever they originate, from applications and operating systems through drivers, firmware, hardware, and system architecture. The role also provides technical leadership on the most difficult issues, develops debug methodologies and tools, mentors engineering teams, and influences architectures to improve observability and diagnosability.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field and 4+ years of Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work experience; or a master's degree in one of these fields and 3+ years of related work experience; or a PhD in one of these fields and 2+ years of related work experience.
• 2+ years of experience with high-performance microprocessor design.
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Extensive experience debugging embedded and real-time systems.
• Expert knowledge of C/C++.
• Strong understanding of application architecture, operating systems, RTOS internals, device drivers, firmware, processor architecture, memory systems, and interrupt architectures.
• Experience with application debugging tools, profilers, crash analysis tools, and tracing infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of multithreading, synchronization, concurrency, and memory management.
• Proven track record solving complex problems spanning software and hardware boundaries.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Qualcomm SoCs, DSPs, NPUs, or mobile computing platforms.
• Experience with Linux, Android, QNX, FreeRTOS, ThreadX, or Zephyr.
• Knowledge of ARM architecture, GIC, cache coherency, DMA, and virtualization technologies.
• Experience with performance analysis, power optimization, and silicon bring-up.
• Experience developing custom debug and telemetry tools.
• Python or scripting experience for automation.

Responsibilities

• Lead investigations into critical customer, field, and development issues.
• Perform root cause analysis across applications, middleware, RTOS, drivers, firmware, and hardware.
• Debug system crashes, hangs, lockups, watchdog resets, memory corruption, data corruption, and performance regressions.
• Develop systematic debug methodologies to accelerate issue isolation and resolution.
• Analyze application failures using logs, traces, profiling tools, debuggers, and instrumentation.
• Debug issues in multithreaded, real-time, and distributed applications, including API misuse, resource leaks, synchronization errors, memory corruption, deadlocks, race conditions, and performance bottlenecks.
• Correlate application behavior with operating system, driver, and hardware activity; partner with software teams to reproduce, isolate, and resolve customer-reported issues.
• Debug RTOS and operating-system scheduler, interrupt, memory management, timer, and synchronization issues.
• Analyze real-time performance constraints, including latency, jitter, and missed deadlines, and investigate kernel crashes, task starvation, priority inversion, and resource contention.
• Develop diagnostic tools and instrumentation to improve system visibility.
• Debug processors, memory subsystems, caches, DMA engines, interrupts, and interconnects, correlating software symptoms with hardware behavior.
• Use hardware debug tools and work with architecture, verification, and silicon teams to identify and resolve complex hardware issues.
• Profile applications and system software; analyze CPU utilization, memory bandwidth, cache efficiency, interrupt load, and latency.
• Drive improvements in application performance, power efficiency, and system responsiveness.
• Develop automation and tooling to support large-scale performance investigations.
• Serve as the escalation point for difficult software and hardware issues.
• Mentor engineering teams on debugging techniques and root cause analysis methodologies.
• Author debug guides, postmortems, and best practices.
• Influence hardware and software architectures to improve observability and diagnosability.

Benefits

• Competitive annual discretionary bonus program.
• Opportunity for annual RSU grants (employees on sales-incentive plans are not eligible for the annual bonus).
• Competitive benefits package designed to support employees at work, at home, and at play.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior