CPU Verification Engineer
Key Skills for This Role
Full Job Posting
THE ROLE
Plan & Strategy: Drive the verification scope, strategy, and test plans for the CPU at unit and/or top level of the CPU design.
Environment Setup: Build, maintain, and scale robust verification environments — stimulus generators, checkers, transactors, and coverage — that exercise the pipeline end to end.
Test & Debug: Generate complex directed and random tests in assembly, C, or random instruction sequences (RIS) to expose corner cases such as speculation, hazards, flushes, and retirement ordering.
Performance Verification: Partner with architects to correlate RTL against performance models, hunting throughput, stall, and branch-prediction-accuracy issues.
Coverage Closure: Define the coverage space, write functional coverage monitors, and analyze metrics to prove the test plan is complete.
Cross-functional Collaboration: Partner with architecture and RTL teams to root-cause failures, drive design fixes, and support emulation, FPGA, and silicon bring-up.
REQUIREMENTS — MUST HAVE
Degree in Electrical/Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
15+ years (Principal) or 4+ years (Senior Engineer) of design-verification experience, ideally on a CPU or complex digital design.
Strong knowledge of CPU micro-architecture and digital logic — pipelines, out-of-order execution, and branch prediction.
Hands-on functional verification: test plans, testbenches, checkers, transactors, and coverage.
Proficiency in C/C++ and/or SystemVerilog, plus a scripting language (Python; Perl a plus).
Experience writing and debugging tests in assembly for CPU verification.
REQUIREMENTS — NICE TO HAVE
Experience on one or more of Front-end / execution-unit verification, load/store cache verification, SoC/System verification, Debug/Power mgmt verification.
Random instruction sequence (RIS) stimulus generation.
Constrained-random verification and coverage-driven closure.
Assertions and formal verification.
Emulation/FPGA and silicon bring-up and debug (waveforms, trace).
Driving a verification problem end-to-end to sign-off.
Qualifications
- MUST HAVE
- Degree in Electrical/Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
- 15+ years (Principal) or 4+ years (Senior Engineer) of design-verification experience, ideally on a CPU or complex digital design.
- Strong knowledge of CPU micro-architecture and digital logic — pipelines, out-of-order execution, and branch prediction.
- Hands-on functional verification: test plans, testbenches, checkers, transactors, and coverage.
- Experience writing and debugging tests in assembly for CPU verification.
- Experience on one or more of Front-end / execution-unit verification, load/store cache verification, SoC/System verification, Debug/Power mgmt verification.
- Random instruction sequence (RIS) stimulus generation.
- Constrained-random verification and coverage-driven closure.
- Assertions and formal verification.
- Emulation/FPGA and silicon bring-up and debug (waveforms, trace).
- Driving a verification problem end-to-end to sign-off.
Preferred Qualifications
- Proficiency in C/C++ and/or SystemVerilog, plus a scripting language (Python; Perl a plus).
- NICE TO HAVE
About Nuvacore
Privately held semiconductor startup designing general-purpose CPU cores for AI infrastructure, data centers, and agentic computing.
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