Design Verification Lead, AI Hardware
About the position Tenstorrent is leading the industry on cutting-edge AI technology, revolutionizing performance expectations, ease of use, and cost efficiency. With AI redefining the computing paradigm, solutions must evolve to unify innovations in software models, compilers, platforms, networking, and semiconductors. Our diverse team of technologists have developed a high performance RISC-V CPU from scratch, and share a passion for AI and a deep desire to build the best AI platform possible. We value collaboration, curiosity, and a commitment to solving hard problems. We are growing our team and looking for contributors of all seniorities. We are seeking a Verification Lead for our next-generation AI hardware. You'll guide a top-tier team of Verification Engineers, shaping test strategies to validate functionality and performance of our AI core. This role requires expertise in AI-specific data types, common AI data-movement compute patterns, and on-chip network validation, combined with strong leadership and collaboration skills. We welcome candidates at various experience levels for this role. During the interview process, candidates will be assessed for the appropriate level, and offers will align with that level, which may differ from the one in this posting. This role is hybrid based out of Austin TX; Toronto, CA; or Belgrade, Serbia.
Responsibilities
- Lead and mentor the verification team, defining strategies that address both AI compute challenges and data-flow requirements.
- Develop and implement verification plans for AI cores and on-chip networks, incorporating multi-core synchronization, concurrency controls, and robust error-injection mechanisms to ensure system resilience.
- Collaborate closely with architecture, design, and software teams to align verification efforts with system-level requirements and evolving AI workloads.
- Architect and oversee the implementation of testbenches, test cases, and coverage models (functional, code, assertion-based), driving coverage closure for AI computations, transformations, and mixed-precision data types (BF16, FP8, INT8, etc.).
- Validate throughput/bandwidth of various AI workloads, debugging bottlenecks to ensure performance and accuracy objectives are met.
- Verify NoC functionality under high-demand traffic, including congestion testing and performance benchmarking, while ensuring functionally correct handling of distributed data-movement strategies.
- Develop platform agnostic test strategies to enable reuse across subsystems, FPGA, SoC, and silicon.
- Analyze test results, track coverage metrics, debug failures, and ensure adherence to performance benchmarks and bandwidth targets.
- Review and approve verification deliverables, ensuring comprehensive coverage, sign-off criteria, and compliance with project timelines and tape-out requirements.
- Adopt emerging AI/ML verification techniques, integrating advanced tools, automation frameworks, and industry best practices.
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
- 10+ years of ASIC/SoC verification experience, with at least 3+ years in a leadership role.
- Proven track record in verifying complex AI/ML hardware architectures or high-performance compute cores.
- Deep expertise in AI-specific data types, tensor operations, and memory access patterns (e.g., BF16, FP8, INT8).
- Hands-on experience with NoC verification, including congestion testing, bandwidth analysis, and performance benchmarking.
- Proficiency in UVM, SystemVerilog, cocotb, and industry-standard verification tools; C/C++ proficiency beneficial.
- Experience with emulation platforms, performance models, and coverage-driven verification methodologies.
- Strong communication and leadership skills, with a history of cross-functional collaboration and guiding teams to successful tape-outs.
Benefits
- Highly competitive compensation package
- Equal opportunity employer
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