Join Microsoft's Silicon and Cloud Hardware Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) team, a leader in powering Intelligent Cloud and AI platforms through innovative silicon and systems. We are seeking a Principal Firmware Engineer to spearhead the design and enhancement of AI accelerator validation and performance characterization frameworks. This role is crucial for supporting our MAIA roadmap and future Azure AI silicon generations, allowing you to shape the future of AI infrastructure.

This position offers a unique opportunity to work at the nexus of system architecture, firmware, software, performance engineering, AI workloads, and silicon validation. You will contribute to high-confidence silicon bring-up, characterization, and hyperscale deployment. Collaborating across diverse technical disciplines, you will develop and deploy validation frameworks and workload solutions that rigorously test compute, memory, networking, and platform infrastructure.

We are looking for a technically adept leader passionate about solving complex engineering challenges and driving significant cross-organizational impact. You will thrive in an environment that fosters a growth mindset, working with cutting-edge technologies and a talented, diverse team across various geographies. This role is instrumental in ensuring silicon readiness, platform quality, performance optimization, and successful production deployment of Microsoft's next-generation AI infrastructure.

- Define and champion the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for scalable system stress and performance characterization frameworks for current and future AI accelerators. - Design and develop high-performance validation and stress workloads covering GPU compute, memory, networking, PCIe, and DMA subsystems. - Architect and implement end-to-end validation strategies, from pre-silicon through post-silicon bring-up, characterization, and production deployment, focusing on early identification of hardware, firmware, and system-level reliability issues. - Develop comprehensive post-silicon tests and tools for functional and performance scenario validation. - Create solutions for performance analysis, telemetry, and observability to measure compute utilization, memory bandwidth, network throughput, power, thermal behavior, and end-to-end workload performance. - Drive the adoption of profiling, performance monitoring, and platform observability technologies to accelerate debugging, tuning, and characterization. - Collaborate closely with Architecture, AI software, Firmware, Silicon Validation, Manufacturing, Performance Engineering, and Cloud Infrastructure teams to influence platform requirements and readiness. - Provide technical leadership through design reviews, architectural guidance, and strategic recommendations to engineering leadership. - Mentor engineers in workload development, performance optimization, debugging, automation, and validation, establishing best practices for software quality, CI/CD, telemetry, and large-scale system validation. - Lead execution across multiple programs, balancing deep technical contributions with broad organizational influence.

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field is required. - A minimum of 12 years of experience developing complex software, firmware, system software, or validation frameworks. - Over 8 years of experience in post-silicon SoC or system validation, or in developing diagnostic, microbenchmark, or stress test content. - Demonstrated experience with at least one of the following: Accelerators or GPUs, DMA Engines, PCIe, Memory (DDR, HBM), or Networking. - Proven experience in one or more of the following areas: Silicon validation, Firmware development, Platform diagnostics, Performance engineering, or Stress and reliability testing. - Experience debugging issues that span hardware, firmware, drivers, SDKs, and applications. - Strong leadership capabilities and proven ability to collaborate effectively across teams.