Senior CPU HW Performance Architect

Senior CPU Hardware Performance Architect

About the Role

We are seeking a Senior CPU Hardware Performance Architect to contribute to the development of next-generation high-performance processor cores.

As a key member of a CPU performance and architecture team, you will lead performance modelling, workload analysis, and microarchitectural exploration to guide critical design decisions across performance, power, and area.

This role requires deep expertise in modern CPU architecture, strong analytical capability, and the ability to work across hardware and software teams to evaluate and shape future processor designs.

Key Responsibilities

• Define next-generation CPU microarchitecture and high-level architectural specifications.

• Work closely with hardware, software, compiler, and performance teams to translate system requirements into architectural decisions.

• Build, extend, and validate cycle-accurate and functional performance models.

• Use simulation and modelling to evaluate emerging CPU microarchitectural concepts.

• Propose new microarchitectural features and assess their impact on performance, power, and area.

• Conduct design-space exploration to identify optimal architectural trade-offs.

• Profile representative workloads and analyse execution bottlenecks.

• Perform sensitivity studies to understand the impact of key architectural parameters.

• Investigate performance behaviour across front-end, execution, memory, and branch-prediction subsystems.

• Support pre-silicon performance evaluation and architecture validation.

• Develop tooling and methodologies for performance analysis, profiling, and simulation.

• Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to resolve architectural and performance issues.

• Communicate performance findings, trade-offs, and technical recommendations to engineering and architecture stakeholders.

Essential Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline with at least five years of relevant experience, or a PhD in a related field.

• Deep understanding of high-performance CPU microarchitecture.

• Strong expertise in one or more areas such as:

  • Instruction fetch and decode

  • Branch prediction

  • Register rename and dispatch

  • Out-of-order execution

  • Execution units

  • Load/store architecture

  • Hardware prefetching

  • Cache and memory hierarchies

• Strong understanding of performance, power, and area trade-offs in high-performance processor design.

• Experience with performance modelling, benchmarking, profiling, or architectural simulation.

• Strong software engineering capability, including modern C++ and Python or comparable languages.

• Experience analysing complex system performance and identifying root causes of bottlenecks.

• Strong debugging and quantitative problem-solving skills.

• Excellent technical communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep expertise in state-of-the-art CPU architecture and microarchitecture.

• Experience taking microarchitectural features from initial concept through implementation and silicon delivery.

• Hands-on experience with cycle-accurate simulators and architectural performance models.

• Experience with pre-silicon performance analysis and validation.

• Knowledge of processor design-space exploration and architectural sensitivity analysis.

• Understanding of compiler behaviour and its interaction with processor architecture.

• Broad understanding of operating systems, runtimes, and application-level workloads.

• Experience analysing commercial, server, HPC, AI, or other performance-sensitive workloads.

• Familiarity with benchmark suites, workload characterisation, and trace-based analysis.

• Experience evaluating architecture changes against PPA targets.

• Patents, peer-reviewed publications, or recognised technical contributions in CPU architecture or processor design.

• Previous technical leadership or ownership of complex architecture initiatives.

Candidate Profile

The successful candidate will combine deep CPU microarchitecture knowledge with strong quantitative analysis and performance modelling skills.

You should be comfortable exploring ambiguous architecture problems, building models to test hypotheses, interpreting workload behaviour, and using data to influence major processor design decisions.

The role is particularly suited to an experienced CPU architect or performance engineer who can connect workload behaviour with low-level microarchitectural design and help shape future high-performance processor cores.