Senior CPU Architecture and Benchmarking Engineer

Intel•Hillsboro, OR

1d•Onsite

About The Position

Join Intel's architecture team as a Senior CPU Architecture and Benchmarking Engineer. You will drive rigorous, low-level investigations into CPU designs, crafting targeted microbenchmarks that expose microarchitectural behavior at fine granularity and translating those findings into actionable architectural guidance. Your work will bridge the gap between silicon measurement, software behavior, and architectural definition, playing a key role in shaping Intel's future CPU roadmap.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related discipline with 8+ years of relevant industry experience, OR a Master's Degree in a related discipline with 6+ years of relevant industry experience
Deep understanding of out-of-order CPU microarchitecture, including pipeline stages, execution resources, memory hierarchy, and power/performance interactions
Demonstrated experience designing and interpreting low-level microbenchmarks for CPU characterization
Proficiency in assembly programming and low-level performance tooling (e.g., EMON/PMU counters, VTune, or equivalent)
Strong background in performance analysis methodologies, bottleneck identification, and quantitative trade-off evaluation
Proficiency in C/C++ and scripting languages (Python or similar) for benchmark development and data analysis

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with cycle-accurate CPU performance simulators and the ability to model and evaluate new microarchitectural features
Understanding of software stack impacts on CPU performance, including OS scheduler behavior, memory allocators, compiler code generation, and BIOS/firmware tuning
Experience reading or debugging RTL to investigate microarchitectural behavior or validate benchmark hypotheses
Track record of translating benchmarking insights into concrete architectural recommendations or published technical contributions

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and analyze pinpointed microbenchmarks to explore and characterize low-level microarchitectural behavior including branch prediction, instruction fetch/decode, execution units, memory subsystem, prefetchers, and power delivery interactions
Investigate and document microarchitectural details of CPU designs through systematic benchmarking and analysis
Evaluate the impact of system software layers — including OS schedulers, runtime libraries, compilers, and firmware — on end-product CPU performance and power efficiency
Identify power/performance gaps and propose concrete architectural solutions and mitigations
Collaborate with silicon lab, simulation, backend, and RTL teams to correlate benchmarking findings with pre-silicon models and post-silicon measurements
Explore and evaluate proposed microarchitectural ideas in CPU performance simulators, providing quantitative measure of value
Develop and maintain tooling, test infrastructure, and analysis frameworks to support repeatable and scalable benchmarking workflows
Communicate technical findings clearly and persuasively in written reports and presentations to senior engineering and product teams