Senior SoC HW (Power & Performance) Validation Engineer

Microsoft•Hillsboro, OR

About The Position

Microsoft Silicon, Cloud Hardware, and Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) delivers infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft’s online businesses and Azure platform. Within SCHIE, Compute Silicon & Manufacturing Engineering (CSME) designs, develops, manufactures, and packages Microsoft computer chips, including Azure Cobalt. The Verification & Validation team works to improve the planning, quality, delivery, scale, and sustainability of Microsoft cloud hardware. The Senior SoC HW (Power & Performance) Validation Engineer owns post-silicon power and performance validation strategy and execution, delivering an optimized and tuned system. The role also contributes to pre-silicon validation and verification, collaborates across engineering organizations, and provides technical leadership and mentorship. The position requires meeting Microsoft and applicable customer or government security screening requirements, including a Microsoft Cloud Background Check and eligibility to access export-controlled information.

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 these fields and at least 4 years of technical engineering experience; or a bachelor's degree in one of these 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.
Eligibility to access export-controlled information; the successful candidate must provide proof of citizenship, U.S. residency, or other protected status for assessment, with citizenship verified using a valid passport or other applicable documents for lawful permanent residents, refugees, and asylees.

Nice To Haves

Understanding of SoC system-level and platform-level functionality, defining silicon validation requirements, and writing scripts or software in industry-standard languages such as Python or C/C++.
Proficient 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.
Demonstrated validation expertise in one or more areas, including power validation, performance testing and tuning, automation, content creation, or tools and scripts development.
Ability to develop synthetic SoC validation content for core, coherency, memory, and I/O to run in bare-metal and OS environments.
Ability to develop sophisticated tools and scripts supporting 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, and drive 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 left by 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.
Drive continuous improvement in validation methodology, automation, telemetry, and analytics to find issues earlier and accelerate root cause.
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.
Adapt as silicon architectures, workloads, firmware, and system requirements evolve, and build alignment across organizational boundaries.
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.