Technical Lead - System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer

Graphcore•Austin, TX

14h

About The Position

Graphcore is seeking a 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 during 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 capabilities. The work spans system-level diagnostics and stress tools for detecting data-integrity, computational-correctness, performance, and reliability issues across CPUs, AI accelerators, memory, storage, PCIe, firmware, BMC, and other platform components. Example work includes silent data corruption tests, power-transient stress tools, and platform diagnostics. The position involves close collaboration with hardware architects, firmware engineers, validation engineers, and diagnostics teams to understand hardware capabilities and turn them into reusable diagnostic software. The engineer will also debug interactions across hardware, firmware, operating systems, and drivers, analyze diagnostic output, and improve fault-isolation methods. Successful work will support hardware quality, silicon bring-up, and long-term platform reliability for future AI infrastructure.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
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 and how CPU, memory, PCIe, storage, networking, firmware, operating systems, and device drivers interact in a complete system.
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 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 with high-speed I/O validation.

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 to 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 supporting 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 engineering productivity across validation teams.