Liftoff Jobs

A curated index of open roles at top-tier AI companies.

CPU Design Verification Lead

Nuvacore

Austin · Santa Clara · $140K–250K · Full-time

Posted 18 Sep 2026

Apply →

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:

  • 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.

  • Develop methodology and flows for running simulations and generate all regression results and debug information.

  • Create test stimulus and relevant coverage metics at both the unit and top level that full stresses all corners of the design

  • Develop golden models and checkers and unit and top level as part of testbench infrastructure

  • Triage issues and write up detailed bug reports to assist the CPU design team in fixing design issues.

  • Develop and write detailed test plans for the CPU units, core, or system.

  • Develop DV methodologies and best practices for the team.

  • Test and debug the performance of a CPU against the performance model.

  • Writing tests in ASM, C, C++, or other to test the CPU’s correctness according to the test plan

  • Leverage formal methods and tools as another approach to determining design correctness

  • Verification and testing of the gate level design of the CPU.  

  • Set up and leverage accelerated test environments such as emulation for high performance design testing

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

  • BS or MS with 15+ years experience in CPU verification

  • Understanding in architecture and design practices and the trade-offs in verifying CPU designs.

  • Experience with one or more of RISC-V, ARM64,j or x86 ISA

  • Strong communication skills and aptitude in debugging and breaking things in CPUs

  • Experience in C, C++, System Verilog, scripting and other languages such as Perl or Python

  • Experience managing and mentoring DV engineers

REQUIREMENTS — PREFERRED

  • Years of expertise in multiple areas of CPU verification including unit level testing, top level testing, emulation, formal verification, coverage metrics

  • 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

  • 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.  

  • Experience managing large (20+) person design verification teams

   

More like this: Hardware roles · AI roles in Austin · All roles at Nuvacore