Senior SoC HW (Power & Performance) Validation Engineer

Microsoft•Hillsboro, OR

2d•$119,800 - $261,000

About The Position

Microsoft Silicon, Cloud Hardware, and Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) builds and operates infrastructure and foundational technologies supporting Microsoft’s cloud services. Within SCHIE, Compute Silicon & Manufacturing Engineering (CSME) is responsible for designing, developing, manufacturing, and packaging computer chips, including Azure Cobalt. The Verification & Validation team defines and delivers operational measures of success for hardware manufacturing, with a focus on quality, delivery, scale, efficiency, and sustainability. The Senior SoC HW (Power & Performance) Validation Engineer owns post-silicon power and performance validation strategy and execution. The role characterizes silicon across workloads and operating conditions, develops validation methodologies and tools, analyzes performance, power, and thermal data, and drives issues through root cause and resolution. It works across architecture, design, firmware, OS, verification, platform, and workload teams to turn product goals into measurable requirements, improve performance per watt, and enable product decisions and readiness. The position also contributes to pre-silicon validation, correlation, and earlier issue detection, while providing technical leadership, coaching, and mentorship.

Requirements

Doctorate in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field and at least 1 year of technical engineering experience; or a master's degree in one of those fields and at least 4 years of technical engineering experience; or a bachelor's degree in one of those fields and at least 5 years of technical engineering experience; or equivalent experience.
Ability to meet Microsoft, customer, and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire or transfer and every two years thereafter.
Ability to meet export-control eligibility requirements for access to controlled information; citizenship or qualifying residency/protected status must be verified with valid documentation as a condition of employment.

Nice To Haves

Understanding of SoC system-level and platform-level functionality, silicon validation requirements, and scripting or software development with industry-standard languages such as Python or C/C++.
Strong communication, collaboration, and teamwork skills, with the ability to lead, grow, and contribute to diverse and inclusive teams.
Experience in verification, logic development, analog validation, or validation tools as part of a CPU, SoC, and/or IP development team.
Leadership skills.
Validation expertise in power validation, performance testing, and tuning.
Experience in automation, content creation, or tools/scripts development.
Ability to develop synthetic SoC validation content for core, coherency, memory, and I/O, for bare-metal and OS environments.
Ability to develop sophisticated tools and scripts for SoC validation debug, including maximum power, current transients, and register dumps.
Understanding of board-level schematics.
Understanding of system-level software and firmware.
Experience running silicon content on pre-silicon platforms such as emulation or FPGA.
Demonstrated success in hardware/software debug efforts.

Responsibilities

Own post-silicon Power & Performance validation strategy and execution, including performance, power, thermal, functional, and electrical characterization across workloads and operating conditions.
Define silicon performance and power characterization methodology across PVT, voltage/frequency operating points, DVFS, power states, and representative system workloads.
Develop and drive performance validation plans covering compute, memory, interconnect, I/O, power management, and system-level workload behavior.
Define, guide, and contribute to silicon debug, telemetry, profiling, and analysis capabilities to identify performance bottlenecks, power inefficiencies, and unexpected silicon behavior.
Partner with architecture, design, firmware, OS, verification, platform, and workload teams to translate product performance and power goals into measurable post-silicon validation requirements.
Analyze performance, power, and thermal data to identify bottlenecks, regressions, and optimization opportunities, driving issues from detection through root cause and resolution.
Develop validation environments, automation, workloads, benchmarks, tools, scripts, and methodologies for efficient Power & Performance characterization and debug.
Execute post-silicon validation and characterization, triage complex cross-layer issues, and correlate behavior across silicon, firmware, OS, platform, and workload layers.
Drive performance-per-watt, workload efficiency, and system-level optimization in partnership with architecture and engineering teams.
Engage with design and verification partners to shift Power & Performance validation earlier, improving pre-silicon modeling, coverage, correlation, and early issue detection.
Apply experience to pre-silicon Power & Performance verification, including workload definition, performance modeling, test development, and pre-to-post-silicon correlation.
Improve validation methodology, automation, telemetry, and analytics to find performance and power issues earlier and accelerate root cause analysis.
Coordinate across organizations on Power & Performance requirements, milestones, dependencies, deliverables, and execution.
Provide technical leadership, coaching, and mentorship in performance analysis, power management, workload characterization, silicon debug, and validation methodology.
Learn and adapt as silicon architectures, workloads, firmware, and system requirements evolve.
Influence across organizational boundaries and build alignment among architecture, design, verification, firmware, OS, platform, and validation teams.
Deliver high-quality, data-driven Power & Performance results on schedule to enable product decisions and readiness.
Provide technical leadership with respect, integrity, engineering rigor, and effective customer focus.