Performance Engineer, Staff
Technology, Data & Digital · Software & Web Development · Software Engineering
In short
We are looking for an experienced systems debug engineer to investigate and resolve complex issues across various layers of the software and hardware stack, including applications, middleware, RTOS, firmware, drivers, and hardware platforms. This role requires deep root cause analysis and the ability to isolate issues regardless of their origin.
Responsibilities
- Lead investigations into critical customer, field, and development issues.
- Perform root cause analysis across applications, middleware, RTOS, drivers, firmware, and hardware.
- Debug system crashes, hangs, lockups, watchdog resets, memory corruption, data corruption, and performance regressions.
- Develop systematic debug methodologies that accelerate issue isolation and resolution.
- Analyze application failures using logs, traces, profiling tools, debuggers, and instrumentation.
- Debug issues involving multi-threaded, real-time, and distributed applications.
- Investigate API misuse, resource leaks, synchronization errors, memory corruption, deadlocks, race conditions, and performance bottlenecks.
- Correlate application behavior with operating system, driver, and hardware activity.
- Partner with software teams to reproduce, isolate, and resolve customer-reported issues.
- Debug scheduler, interrupt, memory management, timer, and synchronization issues.
- Analyze real-time performance constraints including latency, jitter, and missed deadlines.
- Investigate kernel crashes, task starvation, priority inversion, and resource contention.
- Develop diagnostic tools and instrumentation to improve system visibility.
- Debug issues involving processors, memory subsystems, caches, DMA engines, interrupts, and interconnects.
- Utilize JTAG, trace systems, protocol analyzers, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and hardware debug tools.
- Correlate software symptoms with underlying hardware behavior.
- Work with architecture, verification, and silicon teams to identify and resolve complex hardware issues.
- Profile applications and system software to identify bottlenecks.
- Analyze CPU utilization, memory bandwidth, cache efficiency, interrupt load, and latency.
- Drive improvements in application performance, power efficiency, and system responsiveness.
- Develop automation and tooling to support large-scale performance investigations.
- Serve as the escalation point for the most difficult software and hardware issues.
- Mentor engineering teams on debugging techniques and root cause analysis methodologies.
- Author debug guides, postmortems, and best practices.
- Influence hardware and software architectures to improve observability and diagnosability.
Requirements
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
- Extensive experience debugging embedded and real-time systems.
- Expert knowledge of C/C++.
- Strong understanding of application architecture, operating systems, RTOS internals, device drivers, firmware, processor architecture, memory systems, and interrupt architectures.
- Experience with application debugging tools, profilers, crash analysis tools, and tracing infrastructure.
- Strong understanding of multithreading, synchronization, concurrency, and memory management.
- Proven track record solving complex problems that span software and hardware boundaries.
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with Qualcomm SoCs, DSPs, NPUs, or mobile computing platforms.
- Experience with Linux, Android, QNX, FreeRTOS, ThreadX, or Zephyr.
- Knowledge of ARM architecture, GIC, cache coherency, DMA, and virtualization technologies.
- Experience with performance analysis, power optimization, and silicon bring-up.
- Development of custom debug and telemetry tools.
- Python or scripting experience for automation.
Benefits
- Competitive annual discretionary bonus program.
- Opportunity for annual RSU grants.
- Highly competitive benefits package designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play.
Skills
C/C++PythonARM architectureLinuxAndroidQNXFreeRTOSThreadXZephyrDSPNPU
#embedded systems#debugging#performance analysis#root cause analysis#RTOS#firmware#hardware#software
About Qualcomm
Enabling a world where everyone and everything can be intelligently connected.
Enabling a world where everyone and everything can be intelligently connected.\n\n
Company
QualcommJob Posted
4 days ago
Employment Type
Full Time
Work mode
On Site
Salary
US$160,200–240,200 / year
Experience Level
Senior
Locations
Austin, United States of America
Qualification
Bachelor, Master, Doctoral
Applicants
Be an early applicant