Principal System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer

Graphcore•Austin, TX

About The Position

Graphcore is seeking a Principal System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer to develop, extend, and integrate specialized silicon-validation and diagnostics tools for next-generation AI systems-on-chip. The role focuses on creating diagnostic software and stress tools that expose hardware failures, characterize silicon behavior, and improve platform observability throughout bring-up and validation, rather than primarily executing test plans. The engineer will extend existing Arm-developed diagnostics technologies for Graphcore’s AI platform and develop Graphcore-specific system-level diagnostics and stress tools. These tools will 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. Examples include silent data corruption tests, power-transient stress tools, and platform diagnostics. The role involves working closely with hardware architects, firmware engineers, validation engineers, and diagnostics teams to understand new hardware capabilities and turn them into reusable diagnostic software. The engineer will help improve hardware observability and fault isolation, reproduce and investigate difficult failures, and deliver configurable diagnostics across platforms and silicon revisions.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
Strong 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 interactions among CPU, memory, PCIe, storage, networking, firmware, operating systems, and device drivers.
Experience debugging hardware/software interactions across multiple platform layers.
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.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Arm-based server platforms.
Experience with AI accelerators or high-performance computing systems.
Experience with silent data corruption testing.
Experience with hardware stress testing.
Experience with power-transient analysis.
Experience with hardware fault-injection methodologies.
Experience with firmware validation.
Experience with silicon bring-up.
Experience with performance characterization.
Experience with hardware telemetry and observability.
Experience with BMC firmware or server management.
Experience with RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) technologies.
Experience validating CPU scaling and cache behavior.
Experience validating DDR/HBM memory bandwidth, latency, and NUMA effects.
Experience validating interconnect contention under multi-core load.
Experience validating PCIe/I-O throughput, latency, and multi-device scenarios.
Experience validating high-speed I/O.

Responsibilities

Learn and extend existing Arm diagnostics tools to support Graphcore’s AI platform.
Develop specialized diagnostics and stress-testing software for CPU, memory, interconnect, PCIe, and other system components.
Build reusable validation utilities that integrate with the existing validation framework.
Develop tools that expose intermittent hardware failures, including silent data corruption, timing-related issues, and hardware instability.
Design configurable diagnostic applications for multiple silicon revisions, platforms, and execution environments.
Develop automation to execute diagnostics across server and rack-scale validation environments.
Design configuration-driven diagnostics that support scalable parameterization and workload variation.
Collaborate with hardware architects to understand new hardware capabilities and identify missing diagnostics.
Work with firmware and validation teams to improve hardware observability.
Debug low-level interactions among hardware, firmware, operating systems, and drivers.
Analyze diagnostic output and improve fault-isolation methodologies.
Develop software that enables engineers to reproduce and investigate difficult hardware failures.
Contribute reusable libraries and utilities that improve productivity across validation teams.
Extend existing diagnostics technologies to support new Graphcore hardware and develop tools for emerging hardware capabilities.
Build reusable software components that integrate with the existing validation framework and improve root-cause isolation.
Detect and characterize intermittent hardware failures that traditional validation techniques may not expose.
Deliver configurable diagnostics that scale across platforms and silicon revisions.
Collaborate across hardware, firmware, validation, and diagnostics teams to improve platform quality.