Debug Validation Engineer
Molten Ventures (formerly Draper Esprit) is a European venture capital firm that has spent twenty years backing founders and innovators driving Europe's technology transformation. It invests capital alongside experience, energy, and partnership to help visionary technology companies scale, serving high-growth startups and scale-ups across Europe.
About Molten Ventures
Molten Ventures is a publicly listed venture capital firm focused on backing visionary founders building Europe's technology future. Beyond providing capital, the firm offers portfolio companies experience, energy, and partnership to help them scale faster and go further. Its portfolio includes companies that have collectively reached more than 50 million customers, crossed the $200m ARR mark, sold more than 7 million devices, and achieved notable public market outcomes including IPOs at market caps of £1bn and nearly £9bn. The firm operates seed funds, evaluates new investment opportunities and pitch decks from founders, maintains an investor portal for its shareholders, and publishes sustainability reporting covering responsible investment and portfolio engagement practices.
Skills
About the Role
You will drive post-silicon debug and validation activities for next-generation AI compute silicon and systems. You'll lead teams passionate about identifying, reproducing, analyzing, and resolving complex silicon, firmware, and system-level issues during bring-up, characterization, and product readiness. You'll combine deep technical debugging expertise with strong cross-functional collaboration across multiple engineering fields, working closely with architecture, RTL, firmware, software, and systems engineering groups to determine root causes and carry out corrective measures.
Requirements
- Strong experience in bare metal environments
- Strong understanding of SoC and platform architectures
- Expertise in debug infrastructure and post-silicon debug methodologies
- Strong programming skills in Python, C, or debug scripting languages such as CMM or equivalent experience
- Highly motivated self-starter with a collaborative and team-oriented approach
- Ability to collaborate across teams and programming languages to uncover root causes of deep and complex issues
- Experience of the post-silicon validation process applied in digital ASIC environments
- Strong Linux and Python experience
- Outstanding communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively to solve complex problems
- Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and diagnostic skills
- Deep knowledge of scan, DFT, JTAG, and trace infrastructure
- Strong debug skills including fault tree analysis, failure isolation, fishbone methodologies, and system-level debug techniques
- Capability to operate autonomously on technically intricate debug and validation tasks spanning hardware, firmware, and software areas
- Understanding of DFT flows from insertion through post-silicon validation
- Experience developing tooling for parsing and analyzing debug data, including scan dump parsing
- Driver-level experience with PCIe, Ethernet, Memory technologies including LPDDR, DDR, and HBM, Peripheral interfaces such as I2C, I3C, and SPI
- Experience using CoreSight and similar debug infrastructure including CTI, ETx, DStream, JLink, Lauterbach, ATB, and STM or equivalent experience
- Strong understanding of mixed-signal components like PLLs, high-speed PHYs, and IC control/communication protocols
- Experience with Arm CPU architectures, system IP, and associated debug tooling
- Experience with AMBA protocols
- Understanding of ML applications and associated workloads
- Experience in characterization, failure analysis, test development, statistical analysis, and customer support
Responsibilities
- Lead post-silicon debugging and validation efforts for AI compute silicon and platform technologies
- Contribute to debug and validation activities across multiple projects and achievements
- Analyze and address intricate silicon, firmware, software, and system-level problems during bring-up and validation
- Develop structured debug methodologies and failure analysis processes to improve issue resolution efficiency
- Work in close partnership with architecture, RTL, firmware, software, and systems engineering groups to determine root causes and carry out corrective measures
- Drive debug of CPU, memory, interconnect, and high-speed I/O subsystems under functional, stress, and workload conditions
- Develop and improve automated debug, regression, and validation infrastructure using Python and related technologies
- Analyze logs, traces, telemetry, and hardware data to isolate and characterize system failures and performance issues
- Support development of validation tests, debug tooling, and custom diagnostics to improve coverage and observability
- Define validation metrics, debug workflows, and reporting standards to ensure consistent and repeatable analysis
- Communicate technical risks, status, and recommendations clearly to engineering leadership and cross-functional collaborators
- Support silicon readiness reviews and contribute to product quality and release decisions
- Contribute to continuous improvement of debug methodologies, validation infrastructure, and engineering workflows
Benefits
- Flexible working
- Generous annual leave policy
- Private medical insurance and health cash plan
- Dental plan
- Pension (matched up to 5%)
- Life assurance and income protection
- Generous parental leave policy
- Employee assistance programme (health, mental wellbeing, and bereavement support)
- Healthy food and snacks at the office
- Barista bar