Principal Software Engineer (Simulators)

TL;DR

Principal Software Engineer (Simulators): Developing performance and functional models for AI infrastructure to guide architecture decisions and accelerate hardware–software co-design with an accent on chip and system level innovation. Focus on modeling microarchitectural components, generating traces for performance analysis, and optimizing system-level performance-per-watt for inference.

Location: Santa Clara, CA; New York City, NY; or San Francisco, CA

Salary: $250,000 – $325,000

Company

An early-stage AI infrastructure startup backed by Tier-1 VC, innovating at the chip level to deliver superior performance-per-watt for large scale model inference.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and maintain processor simulators, including performance and functional models.
• Model microarchitectural components such as pipelines, memory hierarchy, interconnects, and accelerators.
• Generate and curate traces suitable for targeted performance analysis goals.
• Analyze simulation results to inform architecture tradeoffs and system optimizations.
• Collaborate closely with architecture, hardware, and compiler teams.
• Own critical simulation infrastructure from initial concept through production use.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, ideally in systems, architecture, or EDA domains.
• Strong proficiency in C/C++ and Python with experience in large, complex codebases.
• Experience with processor simulators, architectural modeling, or "from-scratch" simulator development.
• Solid understanding of computer architecture and microarchitecture.
• Ability to work independently and make technical decisions in an early-stage startup.

Nice to have

• Experience with AI/ML accelerators, GPUs, or heterogeneous systems.
• Familiarity with simulators such as gem5, gem5-SALAM, or proprietary modeling tools.