Performance Modeling Engineer

Senior/Principal Software Engineer — Simulator Development

Santa Clara, CA

About the Role

An early-stage semiconductor company is seeking a Senior or Principal Software Engineer to develop performance and functional simulation infrastructure for a next-generation compute platform.

You will join a small, highly technical team building models that guide architecture decisions and accelerate hardware-software co-design. Depending on experience, you may lead major technical areas or contribute as a senior individual contributor with ownership of critical simulation systems.

Leveling will be based on technical scope, ownership, and leadership rather than years of experience alone.

What You’ll Do

• Design, implement, and maintain processor and system simulators.
• Build performance models, functional models, or hybrid simulation environments.
• Model microarchitectural components such as:
• Execution pipelines
• Memory hierarchies
• Interconnects
• Compute engines
• Specialized accelerators
• Generate, curate, and validate traces for targeted performance-analysis use cases.
• Analyze simulation results to identify bottlenecks, evaluate architectural tradeoffs, and guide optimization.
• Develop simulation infrastructure from initial design through production use.
• Improve simulator accuracy, performance, scalability, and usability.
• Collaborate closely with architecture, hardware, compiler, and systems teams.
• Define technical direction and make independent engineering decisions in an ambiguous development environment.
• Contribute to documentation, testing, validation, and automation for simulation workflows.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Strong C or C++ skills.
• Strong Python experience for tooling, automation, data analysis, or model integration.
• Experience working with large and complex software codebases.
• Experience in one or more of the following:
• Processor simulation
• Architectural modeling
• Performance modeling
• Functional modeling
• Microarchitecture simulation
• System-level performance analysis
• Experience developing simulators or modeling infrastructure from the ground up.
• Strong understanding of computer architecture and microarchitecture.
• Ability to reason about pipelines, memory systems, data movement, interconnects, and accelerator behavior.
• Experience analyzing simulation data and translating findings into architectural recommendations.
• Ability to work independently and own technically complex systems.

Preferred Experience

• AI or machine learning accelerators.
• GPUs, CPUs, NPUs, or heterogeneous compute systems.
• Cycle-accurate or event-driven simulation.
• Trace-driven simulation.
• gem5 or similar architecture-simulation frameworks.
• Proprietary performance-modeling or EDA tools.
• Hardware-software co-design.
• Compiler infrastructure or workload modeling.
• Early-stage semiconductor or startup environments.
• Performance benchmarking and bottleneck analysis.

Relevant Keywords

Simulator Development, Processor Simulator, Architecture Simulator, Microarchitecture Simulator, Performance Model, Functional Model, Cycle-Accurate Simulation, Event-Driven Simulation, Trace-Driven Simulation, System Simulation, Architectural Modeling, Performance Analysis, Computer Architecture, Microarchitecture, Execution Pipelines, Memory Hierarchy, Cache Modeling, DRAM Modeling, Interconnect Modeling, NoC Modeling, Accelerator Modeling, GPU Modeling, CPU Modeling, AI Accelerator, Heterogeneous Computing, Workload Modeling, Trace Generation, Trace Curation, Bottleneck Analysis, Architecture Tradeoffs, Hardware-Software Co-Design, gem5, gem5-SALAM, C, C++, Python, EDA, Compiler Integration, Benchmarking