Design Verification Lead

NUVACORE; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Nuvacore is building a high-performance, low-power CPU for next-generation compute workloads. As Design Verification Lead you will head a team verifying functionality and correctness of the CPU design, spanning pre-silicon and post-silicon prep activities.

You will drive test environments, regression strategies, and test plans, while mentoring DV engineers and delivering robust verification results across unit, core, and system levels.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in a relevant engineering field with 15+ years in CPU verification.
• Strong architecture understanding and verification trade-offs.
• Experience with RISC-V, ARM64, or x86 ISA.
• Proven debugging and sign-off ability on CPU programs.

Responsibilities

• Lead test environments for CPU unit, core, or system verification.
• Develop regression, stimulus, coverage, and bug tracking workflows.
• Create test plans, DV methodologies, and best practices for the team.
• Verify CPU performance against models and write tests in ASM/C/C++.
• Set up emulation and formal methods for high-performance verification.

Skills

CPU verification

Debugging

Communication skills

C/C++

SystemVerilog

Scripting (Python/Perl)

Mentoring DV engineers

Leadership

Education

BS or MS in computer engineering / electrical engineering / related field

Tools

Simulation environments

Emulation platforms

Formal verification tools

Job description

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

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 metrics at both the unit and top level that fully stresses all corners of the design
• Develop golden models and checkers at unit and top level as part of test bench 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, 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 microarchitecture 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