Principal Design Verification Engineer

About the team

SambaNova's RDU is the processor behind our inference systems, and design verification ensures quality and reliability before production. The team owns verification for block, full-chip, and gate-level benches, performance verification, coverage closure, and the emulation and FPGA prototypes.

About the role

SambaNova is looking for a Principal Design Verification Engineer to own verification for  our next-generation RDU, the reconfigurable dataflow silicon behind our machine learning and AI systems. This is a senior individual-contributor role where you'll own the test plan, testbench architecture, coverage model, and sign-off criteria, while shaping the team-wide infrastructure, reuse patterns, and verification practices.

You'll work alongside principal engineers from the design, architecture, compiler, and runtime teams who have built and evolved this verification environment across several generations of silicon, to verify the chip against production ML workloads.

Responsibilities

Some of your responsibilities will include...

• Own verification end to end for a major subsystem of the RDU: test plan, testbench architecture, coverage model, and sign-off criteria
• Build the coverage model for your area, set the closure bar, and drive it to closure ahead of tape-out
• Develop testbench components, agents, checkers, and stimulus at block, full-chip, system, and gate level
• Serve as the technical authority for verification of your subsystem: review and arbitrate testbench design decisions, and lead debug on the hardest failures
• Own regression health and failure triage for your area: drive root cause, not just reproduction
• Verify functional and performance behavior
• Advance DV methodology beyond your own area: reusable infrastructure, verification IP integration, and AI-assisted verification workflows the rest of the team adopts
• Contribute to emulation and FPGA prototyping, and support silicon bring-up and post-silicon debug in the lab
• Set the technical bar through design and DV reviews, and mentor engineers to raise the level of the team's verification practice

Required qualifications

• BS or MS in EE, CS, or CE with 7+ years (or equivalent) of industry experience in ASIC design verification
• Deep hands-on expertise in SystemVerilog and SVA with a standard methodology (UVM, OVM, or VMM), plus scripting in Python and C/C++
• Full-cycle DV ownership from test plan through tape-out on at least one complex ASIC or major subsystem, including owning a coverage model to closure
• Experience verifying digital logic in a CPU, GPU, SoC, or comparably complex ASIC
• Track record of debugging hard, intermittent, or low-reproducibility pre-silicon failures to root cause
• Demonstrated technical leadership without formal authority: setting direction in reviews, arbitrating testbench decisions, and mentoring engineers
• Working knowledge of modern computer architecture and of machine learning accelerators or SoCs

Preferred qualifications

• MS or PhD in EE, CS, or CE with 10+ years of experience in ASIC design verification
• Depth in high-speed I/O verification: protocol-level verification of PCIe or Ethernet, and memory subsystems such as HBM or DDR
• Performance verification methodology: building performance benches and analyzing results, not only functional correctness
• Formal verification and assertion-based methods
• Experience evaluating, integrating, and validating third-party verification IP
• Gate-level simulation and debug
• Emulation and FPGA prototyping platforms
• Post-silicon lab bring-up and functional validation, debugging first-silicon issues to root cause
• Strong understanding of one or more of computation, interconnect, or memory systems
• Fluency with Claude or other AI tools applied to verification and flow development