CPU Design Verification Lead
Austin · Santa Clara · $140K–250K · Full-time
Posted 18 Sep 2026
Nuvacore is building a ground-up high performance, low-power CPU for next-generation compute workloads. As Design Verification Lead you will lead the team verifying functionality and correctness of the CPU design. You will be responsible for all phases of pre-silicon verification as well as preparing for post-silicon verification.
THE ROLE
As a CPU Design Verification (DV) Lead, you will lead the team that is driving efforts in all the following areas:
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Building test environments which target every aspect of the CPU unit, core, or system. Your goal is to find every weakness and flaw in the design using proven verification techniques.
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Develop methodology and flows for running simulations and generate all regression results and debug information.
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Create test stimulus and relevant coverage metics at both the unit and top level that full stresses all corners of the design
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Develop golden models and checkers and unit and top level as part of testbench infrastructure
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Triage issues and write up detailed bug reports to assist the CPU design team in fixing design issues.
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Develop and write detailed test plans for the CPU units, core, or system.
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Develop DV methodologies and best practices for the team.
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Test and debug the performance of a CPU against the performance model.
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Writing tests in ASM, C, C++, or other to test the CPU’s correctness according to the test plan
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Leverage formal methods and tools as another approach to determining design correctness
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Verification and testing of the gate level design of the CPU.
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Set up and leverage accelerated test environments such as emulation for high performance design testing
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
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BS or MS with 15+ years experience in CPU verification
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Understanding in architecture and design practices and the trade-offs in verifying CPU designs.
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Experience with one or more of RISC-V, ARM64,j or x86 ISA
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Strong communication skills and aptitude in debugging and breaking things in CPUs
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Experience in C, C++, System Verilog, scripting and other languages such as Perl or Python
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Experience managing and mentoring DV engineers
REQUIREMENTS — PREFERRED
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Years of expertise in multiple areas of CPU verification including unit level testing, top level testing, emulation, formal verification, coverage metrics
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Expertise in one or more areas of CPU microarchtiecture including instruction fetch, branch prediction; instruction decoding, scheduling and register renaming; out-of-order execution; integer and floating point execution; load/store execution; prefetching; cache and memory subsystems; translation and memory management; memory coherence and ordering; power and thermal management; and, clocking / reset design
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Strong background in low power microarchitecture and high-performance verification techniques, with a proven track record of verification and sign-off on multiple CPU programs.
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Experience managing large (20+) person design verification teams
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