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Graphcore, a leading innovator in AI compute infrastructure and member of the SoftBank Group, is seeking a Senior 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.
Key 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
- 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
Success in this role means extending existing diagnostics technologies to support new Graphcore hardware, developing new diagnostics tools for emerging hardware capabilities, building reusable software components that integrate seamlessly with the existing validation framework, improving hardware observability and root-cause isolation, detecting and characterizing intermittent hardware failures, delivering configurable diagnostics that scale across multiple platforms and silicon revisions, and working effectively across hardware, firmware, validation, and diagnostics teams.
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.
Requirements:
Essential:
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical discipline
- 6+ years of 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:
- 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
- Validation across subsystems including CPU scaling and cache behavior, memory (DDR/HBM) bandwidth and latency, interconnect contention under multi-core load, PCIe/I-O throughput and latency, and high-speed I/O validation
