Custom Silicon CPU Architect

CPU Architect Senior (L5 equivalent) 5-8 years

✓ Which company are you aiming at?

To generate precise rejection-prevention feedback and application strategy, tell us where you're targeting.

Apple

NVIDIA

Qualcomm

Intel

AMD

Arm

2 Send your application

You need an account so we know where to send the feedback.

Create an account Sign in

The job description

Tech stack. Domain-specific architecture, gem5, SystemVerilog, PPA analysis, Python, workload-driven design, Arm or RISC-V customization, accelerator integration

About the role

You will architect custom CPUs tailored to specific customer workloads at a semiconductor company building domain-optimized silicon. Custom silicon architects start from the workload rather than the architecture: they profile the target applications deeply, identify exactly which operations dominate, and shape the processor around them, trading generality for efficiency where the business case justifies it. You will work directly with customer engineering teams, define workload-specific microarchitecture, and deliver processors that beat general-purpose alternatives on the metrics the customer actually pays for. You will also define the accelerator integration strategy, deciding which workload kernels earn dedicated hardware and which stay on the programmable CPU fabric.

What you will achieve

Profile customer workloads in depth to identify the instruction mixes, memory patterns, and parallelism characteristics that should drive the custom CPU design.
Define workload-optimized microarchitectures that deliver superior performance per watt or per dollar on target applications compared to off-the-shelf processor alternatives.
Design custom ISA extensions or accelerator couplings justified by rigorous analysis of their benefit on the customer's actual code, not synthetic benchmarks.
Build performance and PPA models specific to the customer engagement, using them to negotiate architecture scope and set contractual performance commitments with confidence.
Partner with customer engineering teams throughout the program, adapting the architecture as workload understanding deepens while protecting schedule and the business case.
Validate the shipped custom silicon against the customer's application-level targets, demonstrating the value of customization with measured production data.

What you will bring

Must-haves

5 to 8 years of experience in CPU architecture or domain-specific processor design with shipped products.
Strong workload analysis skills with the ability to extract architectural insight from application profiling.
Deep microarchitecture knowledge spanning pipelines, memory hierarchies, and specialization techniques.
Experience with the PPA implications of customization: knowing when specialization pays and when generality wins.
Ability to work directly with customers, translating their application needs into architecture and communicating tradeoffs clearly.
Performance modeling discipline with accountability for predictions that become contractual commitments.
Pragmatism about scope: you optimize for the customer's success metrics rather than architectural elegance.

Nice-to-haves

Experience with customer-specific silicon programs in cloud, networking, automotive, or edge markets.
Familiarity with accelerator-rich SoC architectures and CPU-accelerator programming models.
Knowledge of the business and cost aspects of custom silicon engagements.