Principal SoC System Architect

Job Title

Principal SoC System Architect

Role Summary

Own system-level and full-chip architecture for next-generation high-end MPU products targeting robotics, physical AI, industrial control, advanced vision, and multimodal AI. Define scalable, reusable SoC architectures integrating compute, memory, interconnect, I/O, security, safety, and platform management across product tiers.

Collaborate with product, hardware, software/firmware, verification, implementation, and customer teams globally to translate use cases and workloads into architectural decisions and drive those decisions through to silicon bring-up and product validation.

Experience Level

Senior-level. Title indicates principal/senior; multiple years of senior SoC architecture experience expected (not explicitly stated in posting).

Responsibilities

Key responsibilities include defining SoC architecture, translating requirements, and driving cross-functional alignment.

• Own system-level and full-chip architecture from early product definition through silicon bring-up and validation.
• Translate customer use cases, representative workloads, and product strategy into scalable SoC architectures across multiple tiers.
• Define full-chip composition, system data and control flows, subsystem interfaces, and shared resources.
• Allocate performance, power, thermal, memory, bandwidth, latency, QoS, area, and cost budgets and resolve conflicts.
• Define representative concurrent workloads and use quantitative analysis to identify bottlenecks and validate architectural choices.
• Enable HW/SW co-development through clear partitioning, interface definitions, requirements, and assumptions.
• Drive architecture trade-offs and assess implementation feasibility, risk, and schedule impacts.
• Engage senior stakeholders to present proposals, build alignment, and close major technical and business decisions.

Requirements

Must-have technical skills and domain experience. Desirable items are listed separately.

• Extensive experience leading top-level architecture of MPU/Application Processor-class SoCs through implementation and silicon bring-up.
• Broad knowledge of heterogeneous compute, memory hierarchy, cache coherency, interconnects, shared resources, high-speed I/O, system control, power management, security, and platform integration.
• Experience analyzing system performance using quantitative modeling to identify bottlenecks and resource constraints.
• Ability to translate workloads into system requirements, KPIs, and resource budgets.
• Experience enabling HW/SW co-development and incorporating software/firmware constraints into architecture decisions.
• Strong technical leadership and communication skills, with experience aligning global teams and senior stakeholders.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience with high-performance SoCs for robotics, physical AI, industrial networking/control, advanced vision, or multimodal AI workloads.
• Deep expertise in a major SoC domain (compute, memory/interconnect, coherency, real-time, power/thermal, security, or full-chip integration).
• Experience defining scalable/reusable architectures across product families or performance tiers.
• Experience with functional-safety or mixed-criticality architectures and relevant ISO 26262 or IEC 61508 considerations.

Education Requirements

Required: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline. Desirable: advanced degree, relevant patents or publications, standards participation, or recognized technical leadership in SoC/system architecture.

About the Company

Company: Renesas

Headquarters: Hitachinaka, Japan

Renesas is a global leader in embedded semiconductor solutions, providing high-quality products across automotive, industrial, infrastructure, and IoT sectors. With over 22,000 employees in more than 30 countries, the company focuses on scalable solutions that enhance user experience and drive innovation while committed to sustainability and energy efficiency.