Principal System Performance Architect

Job Title

Principal System Performance Architect

Role Summary

Join Arm’s Central Technology Group as a principal architect responsible for defining system performance telemetry and profiling architecture across Arm-based platforms. The role works across hardware, firmware, software, and tooling teams to ensure telemetry supports performance modeling, power-performance optimization, and deployment debugging.

Experience Level

Senior (Principal-level). Specific years of experience not stated.

Responsibilities

Design and specify system-level performance telemetry and profiling to support modeling, optimization, and debugging across heterogeneous platforms.

• Define performance telemetry and profiling architecture spanning CPUs, accelerators, GPUs, memory, interconnects, I/O, networking, storage, and multi-die/chiplet systems.
• Produce architecture guidance, platform specifications, and reference architectures for system-wide performance observability.
• Collaborate with SoC, IP, silicon, power, and platform architects to ensure profiling capabilities are designed into future platforms.
• Specify telemetry requirements to support performance modeling, power-performance analysis, and architectural tradeoffs.
• Develop platform-level performance analysis strategies for heterogeneous and AI-targeted systems.
• Define data collection, correlation, and consumption flows for hardware counters, traces, and system events.
• Translate customer and tooling requirements into scalable telemetry architectures across silicon, firmware, OS, hypervisors, drivers, runtimes, and orchestration layers.
• Define standardized telemetry models for workload characterization, utilization, latency/bandwidth analysis, bottleneck detection, and optimization.
• Work with profiling and tools teams to ensure platforms expose architectural hooks usable by tools such as Linux perf, Arm Streamline, Performance Studio, and similar.
• Participate in silicon bring-up, debug, validation, and platform deployment activities to define needed data, tools, and analysis flows.

Requirements

Must-have experience and skills for this role are listed below. Nice-to-have items follow.

Must-have

• Proven experience in system architecture, performance engineering, performance analysis, or profiling for complex compute platforms.
• Hands-on experience with profiler and performance analysis tools (examples: NVIDIA Nsight, Intel VTune, Linux perf, Windows Performance Analyzer, Arm Streamline, Arm Performance Studio).
• Experience defining or using performance telemetry, hardware performance counters, trace mechanisms, or profiling infrastructure.
• Familiarity with performance analysis methodologies: workload characterization, bottleneck analysis, latency and bandwidth analysis, utilization analysis, and power-performance optimization.
• Experience collaborating with silicon, power, platform, modeling, software, and tooling teams to analyze and optimize system behavior.
• Ability to connect profiling observations and telemetry data to architectural recommendations, power-performance tradeoffs, and deployment decisions.
• Strong communication skills and demonstrated technical leadership across multidisciplinary teams.

Nice-to-have

• Experience with AI infrastructure, distributed or edge AI platforms, robotics, automotive compute, or physical AI systems.
• Familiarity with PCIe, CXL, Ethernet fabrics, RDMA, NVLink/UALink, coherent interconnects, memory pooling, or composable infrastructure.
• Experience with cloud-scale performance observability, capacity planning, workload placement, or fleet-scale optimization.
• Understanding of platform power management, thermal behavior, and RAS and their impact on performance.

Education Requirements

Not specified.

About the Company

Company: Arm

Headquarters: Cambridge, United Kingdom

ARM is a global leader in semiconductor and software design, driving innovation in computing technology. The company specializes in designing processors and systems that provide the essential building blocks for electronic devices. ARM's architecture is widely used in smartphones, servers, and IoT devices, and its collaborative culture fosters bold thinking, diversity, and high-impact benefits for its talented workforce.