Staff/Principal Software Validation Engineer

Job Title

Staff/Principal Software Validation Engineer

Role Summary

Lead validation for Arm Neoverse-based platform software across pre-silicon and silicon stages to ensure system readiness, release confidence, and customer-facing robustness. The role combines technical leadership, hands-on validation guidance, and people management within Arm's System Solutions software organization.

Experience Level

Senior — requires substantial experience; the posting specifies 14+ years of industry experience in building, validating, or delivering complex system software with proven people leadership.

Responsibilities

Accountable for defining validation strategy, executing validation across environments, and enabling teams to deliver production-quality platform software.

• Set direction and priorities for the validation function; lead, coach, and develop engineers to meet clear goals and delivery milestones.
• Own validation approach across FVP, emulation, FPGA, RTL co-validation, bring-up boards, CRBs, and production environments; define stage-specific validation scope and required evidence.
• Participate in architecture and design reviews; review validation plans, test coverage, failure analysis, and automation strategies.
• Provide hands-on debugging and technical guidance to resolve complex system issues when required.
• Collaborate with firmware, QA, release, automation, hardware, and customer-facing teams to align validation with product and customer needs.
• Drive a quality-first culture: establish entry/exit criteria, meaningful regression coverage, reproducible results, and traceability from requirements to release evidence.

Requirements

Core skills and experience required; followed by preferred skills.

Must-have:

• 14+ years industry experience in system software validation, delivery, or development on pre-silicon and silicon platforms.
• Experience with firmware, platform software, or low-level system software validation; demonstrated ownership of complex validation strategies.
• Broad system-level knowledge across boot flows, HW/SW interfaces, OS interactions, device initialization, and platform services.
• Strong technical judgment for assessing validation trade-offs, managing quality risk, and making release-readiness recommendations.
• Solid understanding of validation and quality practices: test strategy, coverage planning, CI/regression, automation, defect triage, reproducibility, and release criteria.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills across distributed teams and multiple engineering groups.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience on server or infrastructure platforms and customer-facing production environments.
• Familiarity with system architecture (preferably Arm), bootloaders, firmware interfaces, drivers, and board bring-up flows.
• Experience with platform compliance/readiness programs (e.g., SystemReady, ACS), security validation, or customer acceptance testing.
• Background in building/scaling validation teams, lab automation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, or release-readiness processes.
• Experience in globally distributed teams.

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.