Sr Principal CPU Microarchitect

Job Title

Sr Principal CPU Microarchitect

Role Summary

Design and deliver microarchitectural specifications and RTL for major CPU functional blocks within the MIPS team. The role works across performance modeling, verification, physical design, and software teams to meet power, performance, area, and schedule targets.

The position emphasizes hands-on RTL development, technical leadership, and mentoring of engineering colleagues on CPU microarchitecture projects.

Experience Level

Senior — requires 15+ years of relevant industry experience.

Responsibilities

Primary ownership and contribution across microarchitecture definition, RTL implementation, verification support, and physical convergence.

• Create microarchitectural specifications from early exploration through detailed definition in collaboration with performance modeling.
• Design, implement, and converge RTL for major functional blocks to meet performance, timing, power, area, and schedule requirements.
• Support verification teams: testbench and test plan development, test content, and performance verification.
• Collaborate with physical design and DFT teams to implement and converge physical design and testability.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to engineers on design and implementation choices.

Requirements

Core technical skills and experience required and preferred.

Must-have:

• 15+ years of industry experience working on CPU microarchitecture (topics such as instruction fetch/branch prediction, decode, scheduling, out-of-order execution, register renaming, integer/FPU execution, exception handling, load/store, cache or memory subsystems).
• Hands-on RTL development experience using Verilog, SystemVerilog, or VHDL.
• Expertise in logic design and use of commercial simulators and debugging tools.
• Proven ability to collaborate with performance modeling, verification, physical design, and DFT teams.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience balancing timing, power, and area trade-offs in CPU designs and applying high-performance microarchitectural techniques.
• Familiarity with ISAs such as RISC-V, ARMv8, or x86.
• Scripting skills and regular-expression use for automation and debug.
• Programming experience in assembly, C, or C++ and experience with emulators.

Education Requirements

Minimum BS (Bachelor's) and 15+ years of relevant industry experience. No additional degree fields, certifications, or explicit equivalent-experience wording are specified in the posting.

About the Company

Company: GlobalFoundries

Headquarters: Saratoga Springs, New York, USA

GlobalFoundries is a leading contract manufacturer for the global semiconductor industry, with facilities in multiple countries, including the USA. The company develops a broad portfolio of semiconductor technologies and employs around 13,000 people worldwide. GlobalFoundries focuses on enhancing competitiveness in specialized application solutions and fostering innovation in mobile communications, consumer electronics, and automotive applications.