Principal Performance Tools Engineer

About SiFive

As the pioneers who introduced RISC-V to the world, SiFive is transforming the future of compute by bringing the limitless potential of RISC-V to the highest performance and most data-intensive applications in the world. SiFive’s unrivaled compute platforms are continuing to enable leading technology companies around the world to innovate, optimize and deliver the most advanced solutions of tomorrow across every market segment of chip design, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, automotive, data center, mobile, and consumer. With SiFive, the future of RISC-V has no limits.

At SiFive, we are always excited to connect with talented individuals, who are just as passionate about driving innovation and changing the world as we are.  

Our constant innovation and ongoing success is down to our amazing teams of incredibly talented people, who collaborate and support each other to come up with truly groundbreaking ideas and solutions.  Solutions that will have a huge impact on people's lives; making the world a better place, one processor at a time. 

Are you ready?  

To learn more about SiFive’s phenomenal success and to see why we have won the GSA’s prestigious Most Respected Private Company Award (for the fourth time!), check out our website and Glassdoor pages.

Job Description:

SiFive is creating RISC-V based CPU IPs faster and cheaper than ever before by combining the best practices of rapid, iterative software design with the proven fidelity of hardware engineering.  State-of-the-art tooling is a critical component of SiFive's success.   We are seeking a season engineering leader to create and deliver a vision of performance simulation tool suite to help SiFive succeed in developing next generation high performance processors as well as enabling customers to use SiFive products

Responsibilities:

• Work with internal and external partners to identify requirements for performance simulation tools 

• Develop a vision and plans to build state-of-the-art tools

• Lead a team of engineers to execute and deliver these tools

Requirements:

• MS or PhD in Computer Science / Computer Architecture

• 10+ years direct industry experience in performance simulation tools - from ISA to SoC / system simulators; from analytical to cycle-based models; from bare-metal environment to virtual machines. 

• 5+ years involved in the engineering team to deliver HW or SW products.

• Strong foundation in computer architecture of high performance out-of-order CPU designs.  Awareness of known industry micro-architectures is a plus.

• Strong foundation in workload characterization to identify HW/SW performance bottlenecks

• Strong foundation in workload reduction techniques for efficient performance simulation and projection 

• Competency in software engineering best practices needed to maintain and refactor very large object oriented code bases.  

• Strong object-oriented programming (OOP) skills, including encapsulation, class coherency, inheritance and polymorphism

• Strong Discrete Event Simulation (DES) competency, particularly with regard to DES modeling techniques and best practices

• Ability to independently analyze performance bottlenecks in micro-architecture and software stack.  Awareness of potential security holes is a plus.

• Desirable: Hands-on expertise with either HW development (RTL/implementation flows, verification/validation, backend flows, FPGA flows) or SW development (C/assembly, OS/RTOS, IDEs, Compiler/Debuggers). 

• Desirable: FPGA debug, including the use of Integrated Logic Analyzer for waveform capture and debug

• Desirable: Familiar with git and branching/forking