Simulator & Debug Tools Lead

Normal Computing Corporation • Palo Alto, CA

3d

About The Position

Normal Computing is an applied AI company developing foundational hardware and software for the semiconductor industry, AI infrastructure, and related systems. The company works across New York City, Mountain View, London, Copenhagen, and Seoul.

Normal's hardware performs memory-bound large-model inference inside memory. Because standard simulation tools do not support this hardware, the company is building its own simulator so compiler and hardware teams can validate their work before silicon exists. The Simulator & Debug Tools Lead will own the simulator and its debugging and profiling tools, which integrate with the compiler. This is a hands-on technical leadership role balancing simulator fidelity, performance, and tooling investment, and ensuring teams have a reliable view of hardware capabilities.

Requirements

• Experience building or leading development of hardware simulators, cycle-accurate or functional, for ASICs or novel compute architectures.
• Experience building debuggers, tracers, or profilers adopted by other engineers.
• Systems and compiler context sufficient to simulate both the software stack running on hardware and the hardware itself.
• Comfort working with evolving hardware and adapting the simulator as the hardware changes.
• Fluency in C++ or Rust for simulator performance.
• Familiarity with Python for tooling.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with in-memory compute or other non-von-Neumann architectures.
• Experience building simulators that directly informed architectural or compiler decisions, beyond post-hoc validation.
• Experience with open-source simulation, tracing, or hardware-tooling communities.
• Background spanning both pre-silicon simulation and post-silicon bring-up.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and roadmap of the hardware simulator, including accuracy, performance, and coverage of new hardware features.
• Ensure simulator behavior, state, and memory semantics are trustworthy for compiler and runtime engineers.
• Build debuggers, tracers, and profilers that help engineers find and fix bugs quickly.
• Partner with Design Verification and bring-up teams to correlate the simulator with RTL, FPGA prototypes, and eventually silicon, resolving discrepancies.
• Build simulator benchmarks and traces based on LLM inference workloads.
• Decide how to balance simulator fidelity, speed, and tooling investment, and explain those tradeoffs to compiler and hardware teams.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed