Senior System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer

About us

Graphcore is one of the world’s leading innovators in Artificial Intelligence compute.

It is developing hardware, software and systems infrastructure that will unlock the next generation of AI breakthroughs and power the widespread adoption of AI solutions across every industry.

As part of the SoftBank Group, Graphcore is a member of an elite family of companies responsible for some of the world’s most transformative technologies. Together, they share a bold vision: to enable Artificial Super Intelligence and ensure its benefits are accessible to everyone.

Graphcore’s teams are drawn from diverse backgrounds and bring a broad range of skills and perspectives. A melting pot of AI research specialists, silicon designers, software engineers and systems architects, Graphcore enjoys a culture of continuous learning and constant innovation.

The Team

The team is responsible for developing and applying system-level diagnostics and validation capabilities that help ensure the quality and reliability of Graphcore’s AI computing platforms.

Working closely with hardware architects, firmware engineers, validation engineers and software teams, the team develops reusable diagnostic software that exercises complete systems and provides the observability needed to understand complex hardware and software interactions. The work spans silicon bring-up, system validation, stress testing, fault isolation and platform characterization.

Responsibilities and Duties

The System Tests & Diagnostics Engineer will develop, extend and integrate specialist silicon validation and diagnostic software for Graphcore’s AI computing systems. The role will focus on creating diagnostic and stress-testing capabilities that expose hardware failures, characterize system behaviour and improve platform observability throughout silicon bring-up and validation.

Working across hardware, firmware and software boundaries, you will independently lead complex diagnostic development activities and help improve the tools and methodologies used to identify, reproduce and isolate challenging system-level issues.

• Design, develop and extend system-level diagnostic and stress-testing software for Graphcore AI computing platforms.
• Develop diagnostic applications covering processors, memory, interconnects, PCIe, storage, networking and other system components.
• Build reusable validation utilities and libraries that integrate with Graphcore’s system validation infrastructure.
• Develop tools to identify and characterize intermittent hardware failures, including data integrity issues, timing-related failures and system instability.
• Design configurable diagnostic applications capable of supporting multiple silicon revisions, platforms and execution environments.
• Develop automation for executing diagnostics across server and rack-scale validation environments.
• Create configuration-driven diagnostic capabilities that enable scalable parameterization, workload variation and repeatable testing.
• Work with hardware architects and engineering teams to understand new hardware capabilities and identify opportunities for additional diagnostic coverage.
• Collaborate with firmware and validation engineers to improve platform observability and fault isolation.
• Debug complex interactions between hardware, firmware, operating systems and device drivers.
• Analyze diagnostic results, identify failure patterns and develop improved methods for reproducing and isolating system-level issues.
• Develop software and tooling that enables engineering teams to reproduce, investigate and resolve difficult hardware failures efficiently.
• Contribute reusable software components and engineering practices that improve productivity and diagnostic capability across validation teams.
• Provide technical guidance and collaborate across engineering disciplines to solve complex system validation and diagnostic problems.
  
  

Candidate Profile

Essential

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• 5+ years of experience developing hardware diagnostics, system validation software, firmware validation tools, or low-level systems software.
• Strong software development skills in Python and C/C++.
• Strong Linux systems experience.
• Strong understanding of modern server platform architecture, including how CPU, memory, PCIe, storage, networking, firmware, operating system, and device drivers interact within a complete system.
• Experience debugging hardware/software interactions across multiple layers of the platform.
• Experience developing diagnostics, stress testing, or hardware validation software.
• Experience with server platforms, embedded systems, or SoC validation.
• Strong analytical and debugging skills.
• Experience collaborating across hardware, firmware, software, and validation teams.
• Excellent communication and problem-solving skills.
  
  

Desirable:

• Experience with one or more of the following:

  • Arm-based server platforms
  • AI accelerators or high-performance computing systems
  • Silent Data Corruption (SDC) testing
  • Hardware stress testing
  • Power transient analysis
  • Hardware fault injection methodologies
  • Firmware validation
  • Silicon bring-up
  • Performance characterization
  • Hardware telemetry and observability
  • BMC firmware or server management
  • RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) technologies
  • Validate across subsystems:
  • CPU scaling and cache behavior
  • Memory (DDR/HBM) bandwidth, latency, and NUMA effects
  • Interconnect contention under multi-core load
  • PCIe/I-O throughput, latency, and multi-device scenarios
  • High-speed I/O validation

Successful candidates will:

• Extend existing diagnostics technologies to support new Graphcore hardware.
• Develop new diagnostics tools for emerging hardware capabilities.
• Build reusable software components that integrate seamlessly with the existing validation framework.
• Improve hardware observability and root-cause isolation.
• Detect and characterize intermittent hardware failures that traditional validation techniques cannot expose.
• Deliver configurable diagnostics that scale across multiple platforms and silicon revisions.
• Work effectively across hardware, firmware, validation, and diagnostics teams to continuously improve platform quality.

USA Benefits

In addition to a competitive salary, Graphcore offers flexible working and a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your health, wellbeing and financial future. Our benefits include medical, dental and vision coverage, Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs), Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), disability and life insurance, a 401(k) retirement plan, commuter benefits, wellness services and an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP). We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences; we're committed to building an inclusive work environment that makes Graphcore a great home for everyone. We offer an equal opportunity process and understand that there are visible and invisible differences in all of us. We can provide a flexible approach to interview and encourage you to chat to us if you require any reasonable adjustments.