System SOC/silicon Validation - Staff/Sr Staff Engineer

General Summary:

Qualcomm is a global leader in technology innovation, driving digital transformation and next-generation experiences. As a Qualcomm Hardware Engineer, you will contribute to the design, optimization, verification, and testing of electronic systems, including digital, analog, RF, optical, and mechanical components. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop cutting-edge SoC silicon and ensure product quality and performance.

Role Overview:

You will join Qualcomm's SoC Validation Team (SVE), responsible for overall silicon quality. The team partners closely with architects, designers, verification engineers, software teams, and customers to validate SoC functionality. This role focuses on bare-metal SoC validation, developing validation frameworks, test plans, and system-level use cases to uncover and debug hardware bugs, while driving silicon quality and performance improvements.

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and debug system/IP validation frameworks for bare-metal and light-weight RTOS environments.
• Understand SoC architecture and new features to prepare comprehensive test plans.
• Develop, port, and enhance validation content based on system-level and low-power use cases.
• Collaborate with Design, Verification, Software, and Customer Engineering teams to coordinate test plans and debug complex issues.
• Use silicon debug hooks to measure power, performance, and coverage metrics.
• Manage and mentor a team of silicon validation engineers.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Electronics, Communication Engineering, Computer Science, or related field.
• 11+ years of experience in SoC validation (exceptional candidates with less experience and strong academic background may be considered).
• Strong embedded software expertise, including C, C++, Assembly, and low-level programming.
• Experience across IP validation flows—architecture review, test plan creation, test development, execution, and debugging—especially in CPUSS, DDRSS, Multimedia blocks (Camera, Video, Display, GPU).
• Solid understanding of ARM, x86, PowerPC CPU architectures, interrupt handling, cache and IO coherency.
• Experience with multicore/multiprocessor SoC architectures including SMP/heterogeneous cores and memory management.
• Experience managing and mentoring team members.
• Proficiency with compilers/linkers (GCC, CLANG, RVDS, LLVM) and debugging tools like JTAG.
• Familiarity with scripting languages such as Python and shell scripting.

Desired Skills:

• Exposure to SoC interconnects, power management, and emulation/pre-silicon environments.
• Experience working with ARM boot code.
• Knowledge of operating systems, RTOS, Linux kernel internals, multithreading, scheduling, locking, and virtual memory management.
• Hands-on experience with board bring-up, hardware-software integration on FPGA/emulation platforms.
• Familiarity with build automation tools such as Jenkins and creating automated build pipelines.
• Understanding of regression testing methodologies and tools.
• Strong code review skills ensuring code quality and best practices.