Principal System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer

Title: Principal System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer Location: Austin, Texas, United States

About us

Graphcore is one of the world’s leading innovators in Artificial Intelligence compute.

It is developing hardware, software and systems infrastructure that will unlock the next generation of AI breakthroughs and power the widespread adoption of AI solutions across every industry.

As part of the SoftBank Group, Graphcore is a member of an elite family of companies responsible for some of the world’s most transformative technologies. Together, they share a bold vision: to enable Artificial Super Intelligence and ensure its benefits are accessible to everyone.

Responsibilities and Duties

We are seeking a highly skilled Principal System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer to develop, extend, and integrate specialized silicon validation and diagnostics tools for next-generation AI SoCs.

Unlike traditional validation roles focused on executing test plans, this position is responsible for developing the diagnostic software and stress tools that expose hardware failures, characterize silicon behavior, and improve platform observability throughout bring-up and validation.

You will work closely with Arm engineers to understand and extend existing diagnostics technologies while developing Graphcore-specific capabilities for future AI hardware.

Role Summary

You will work with existing Arm-developed diagnostics technologies and extend them to support Graphcore's next-generation AI silicon.

You will be responsible for developing system-level diagnostics and stress tools that integrate with an existing framework to detect data integrity, computational correctness, performance, and reliability issues across CPUs, AI accelerators, memory, storage, PCIe, firmware, BMC, and other platform components. Examples include silent data corruption (SDC) tests, power transient stress tools, and platform diagnostics, with opportunities to develop new diagnostics as future hardware capabilities evolve.

This role requires close collaboration with hardware architects, firmware engineers, validation engineers, and diagnostics teams to understand new hardware capabilities and translate them into reusable diagnostic software.

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.

Candidate Profile

Essential

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Strong 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.

Desirable:

• Preferred Qualifications

  • 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

  What Success Looks Like

  Successful candidates will:

  • Extend existing diagnostics technologies to support new Graphcore hardware.
  • Develop new diagnostics tools for emerging hardware capabilities.
  • Build reusable software components that integrate seamlessly with the existing validation framework.
  • Improve hardware observability and root-cause isolation.
  • Detect and characterize intermittent hardware failures that traditional validation techniques cannot expose.
  • Deliver configurable diagnostics that scale across multiple platforms and silicon revisions.
  • Work effectively across hardware, firmware, validation, and diagnostics teams to continuously improve platform quality.

Why Join Graphcore?

This role provides a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of hardware architecture, diagnostics, and software engineering while helping define how next-generation AI systems are validated.

Rather than maintaining an existing validation framework, you will develop the specialized diagnostics and stress tools that make that framework valuable. Your work will directly influence hardware quality, silicon bring-up, and long-term platform reliability for future AI infrastructure.

USA Benefits

In addition to a competitive salary, Graphcore offers flexible working and a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your health, wellbeing and financial future. Our benefits include medical, dental and vision coverage, Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), disability and life insurance, a 401(k) retirement plan, commuter benefits, wellness services and an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP). We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences; we're committed to building an inclusive work environment that makes Graphcore a great home for everyone. We offer an equal opportunity process and understand that there are visible and invisible differences in all of us. We can provide a flexible approach to interview and encourage you to chat to us if you require any reasonable adjustments.