Technical Lead - System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer

Graphcore•Austin, TX

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Graphcore is a leading innovator in Artificial Intelligence compute, developing hardware, software, and systems infrastructure to drive AI breakthroughs and widespread adoption. As part of the SoftBank Group, Graphcore is committed to enabling Artificial Super Intelligence and making its benefits accessible to everyone. This role is for a highly skilled System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer responsible for developing, extending, and integrating specialized silicon validation and diagnostics tools for next-generation AI SoCs. Unlike traditional validation roles, this position focuses on developing diagnostic software and stress tools to expose hardware failures, characterize silicon behavior, and enhance platform observability during bring-up and validation. The engineer will collaborate with Arm engineers to understand and extend existing diagnostics technologies while developing Graphcore-specific capabilities for future AI hardware.

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, including how CPU, memory, PCIe, storage, networking, firmware, operating system, and device drivers interact within a complete system.
Experience debugging hardware/software interactions across multiple layers of the platform.
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

Arm-based server platforms
AI accelerators or high-performance computing systems
Silent Data Corruption (SDC) testing
Hardware stress testing
Power transient analysis
Hardware fault injection methodologies
Firmware validation
Silicon bring-up
Performance characterization
Hardware telemetry and observability
BMC firmware or server management
RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) technologies
Validate across subsystems: CPU scaling and cache behavior, Memory (DDR/HBM) bandwidth, latency, and NUMA effects, Interconnect contention under multi-core load, PCIe/I-O throughput, latency, and multi-device scenarios, 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 into the existing validation framework.
Develop tools that expose intermittent hardware failures including silent data corruption, timing-related issues, and hardware instability.
Design configurable diagnostic applications supporting multiple silicon revisions, platforms, and execution environments.
Develop automation for executing 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 closely with firmware and validation teams to improve hardware observability.
Debug low-level hardware, firmware, operating system, and driver interactions.
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 multiple validation teams.