Senior DDR and Execution Validation Engineer
Graphcore is a Bristol-based AI chipmaker (IPU accelerators), a SoftBank subsidiary and a Molten Ventures portfolio company.
Maintainer signals as of 8/23/2026
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
Reporting to the Memory Validation leadership team, the Senior Silicon DDR/HBM Validation Engineer will bring up, validate, characterize, and debug advanced memory subsystems for next-generation AI compute platforms. The role involves collaboration with silicon design, firmware, characterization, platform, and systems teams to ensure robust functionality, performance, and reliability.
Requirements
- Experience validating DDR, LPDDR, HBM, or related DRAM technologies
- Understanding of DRAM architecture, memory subsystems, and memory controllers
- Experience with firmware, BIOS, and Embedded C development
- Strong programming skills in C and Python
- Experience using oscilloscopes and laboratory measurement instrumentation
- Experience with GPIO, SPI, I2C, and UART or serial interfaces
- Experience with functional testing and voltage, frequency, and timing analysis
- Knowledge of embedded systems and microcontroller-based platforms
- Experience with board bring-up and hardware validation
- Experience debugging hardware, firmware, and system-level issues
- Experience with silicon characterization and validation analysis
- Experience with memory IP bring-up, PHY behavior, training algorithms, and calibration flows
- Experience with memory margining, stress testing, and reliability validation
- Familiarity with JTAG, trace infrastructure, and low-level debug tools
Responsibilities
- Execute DDR and HBM memory subsystem validation and bring-up activities
- Verify memory bring-up software, firmware, and scripts
- Debug firmware, hardware, and system-level issues
- Analyse logs, validation data, and characterization results
- Perform PHY characterization and analog-level analysis
- Develop and execute functional, stress, performance, and corner-case tests
- Perform signal integrity, voltage, frequency, and timing measurements
- Characterize memory bandwidth, latency, training behavior, and subsystem stability
- Develop Python-based automation, test infrastructure, and reporting tools
- Investigate and resolve technical issues with architecture, RTL, firmware, and platform teams
- Support silicon characterization, production readiness, and qualification activities
- Document validation results and communicate findings