Senior Staff Engineer (CPU, Front-End Verification)

Tenstorrent; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Tenstorrent seeks a Design Verification Engineer to drive unit-level verification of our RISC‑V CPU front end, including instruction fetch, branch prediction, and fetch control structures.

You will build testbenches, generate stimulus, and develop checkers for complex microarchitectural scenarios, collaborating with RTL and software teams to ensure reliable hardware.

Qualifications

• Experience verifying CPU front-end blocks—fetch, BTB/TAGE, and decode.
• Hands-on unit testbench development with precise stimulus and checks.
• Ability to build reusable DV components such as transactors and scoreboards.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain front-end DV testbenches for instruction fetch units.
• Create constrained-random and directed tests targeting fetch and prediction paths.
• Collaborate with RTL, performance modeling, and software teams.
• Trace misspeculation and edge-case fetch bugs and verify fixes.

Skills

CPU front-end DV

SystemVerilog

UVM

C++

Testbench development

Transactors

Scoreboards

Stimulus generation

Tools

Verilator

Job description

• We are looking for a Design Verification Engineer to contribute to the unit-level verification of our RISC‑V CPU front end—including instruction fetch, branch prediction, and surrounding fetch control structures. As a key individual contributor within our front‑end DV team, you will focus on building testbenches, generating stimulus, and developing checkers for complex microarchitectural scenarios
• Front‑End Experience: Solid background verifying CPU front‑end blocks—such as instruction fetch, branch predictors (BTB, TAGE, RAS), instruction caches/TLBs, or decode—using SystemVerilog, UVM, and C++
• Unit‑Level Focus: Hands‑on experience building clean, controllable unit testbench environments with precise stimulus and checking
• Reusable Design: Pragmatic approach to building transactors, predictors, and scoreboards that can be reused across verification levels
• Collaborative Problem Solver: Comfortable working alongside RTL designers to trace and fix misspeculation, redirect, and edge‑case fetch bugs
• What You Will Learn:
• RISC‑V Front‑End Microarchitecture: Practical experience with high‑performance RISC‑V fetch pipelines and prediction structures
• Maintainable DV Infrastructure: Strategies for writing unit testbenches that remain manageable as designs evolve
• Tooling & Workflows: Experience using both industry‑standard simulators and open‑source flows (e.g., Verilator) across simulation and emulation environments
• Cross‑Team Collaboration: Working directly with RTL, performance modeling, and software teams to deliver reliable hardware

We welcome candidates at various experience levels for this role. During the interview process, candidates will be assessed for the appropriate level, and offers will align with that level, which may differ from the one in this posting

• C++ Integration: Help develop and maintain C++ reference models and predictors that integrate into the verification framework for cycle‑accurate or transaction‑level checking
• Stimulus Generation: Develop constrained‑random and directed tests targeting speculation depth, misprediction/redirect flows, fetch bubbles, and cache/TLB interactions
• Execution & Closure: Execute verification plans, track functional and code coverage metrics, and ensure edge cases are verified
• Unit‑Level Verification: Work within the front‑end DV team to build and maintain UVM testbenches for instruction fetch units, branch predictors, and related sub‑blocks

This offer of employment is contingent upon the applicant being eligible to access U.S. export‑controlled technology