Principal Power and Performance Validation Engineer
Graphcore is a Bristol-based AI chipmaker (IPU accelerators), a SoftBank subsidiary and a Molten Ventures portfolio company.
Maintainer signals as of 8/20/2026
About Graphcore
Graphcore (graphcore.ai) is a British semiconductor company building Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) for AI workloads. Founded in Bristol in 2016, it was acquired by SoftBank in 2024. It is a portfolio company of Molten Ventures.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will lead power, thermal, and performance validation for AI compute silicon and systems across pre-silicon and post-silicon environments. You will manage and mentor validation engineers, define validation plans and metrics, develop Python automation and workload frameworks, analyze performance data, debug hardware and software interactions, and coordinate delivery across projects and stakeholders.
Requirements
- Power and performance validation experience
- Silicon characterization or system performance engineering experience
- Engineering team leadership or management experience
- Modern SoC architecture knowledge
- Linux systems knowledge
- Low-level performance analysis
- Python
- Benchmarking
- Profiling
- Hardware and software debugging
- Validation methodology
- Workload modelling
- Test strategy
- Data analysis
- Stakeholder management
- Cross-functional collaboration
Responsibilities
- Define validation strategies for power, thermal, and performance characterization
- Lead and mentor validation engineers
- Plan and prioritize validation activities across projects
- Develop validation plans for functional, stress, workload, and corner-case scenarios
- Lead post-silicon bring-up and characterization
- Validate CPU, memory, interconnect, and high-speed I/O subsystems
- Develop Python automation frameworks and regression infrastructure
- Design benchmark workloads and performance experiments
- Debug hardware and software issues with cross-functional teams
- Define validation metrics and pass/fail criteria
- Analyze power, thermal, and performance data
- Communicate findings, risks, and recommendations
- Support hiring, onboarding, and team growth