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. The role combines technical leadership, hands-on validation strategy, and people management to ensure platform readiness, release confidence, and customer-facing robustness.

Experience Level

Senior — typically requires 14+ years of industry experience validating or delivering complex system software and proven people leadership.

Responsibilities

The Validation Lead defines validation strategy, guides delivery, and ensures evidence-based release readiness across platform stages.

• Set direction and priorities for the validation function; define entry/exit criteria and validation goals.
• Own validation approaches across FVP, emulation, FPGA, RTL co-validation, bring-up boards, CRBs, and production environments.
• Define what must be validated at each development stage and the required evidence for release decisions.
• Provide technical leadership, coach engineers, and enable delivery through delegation and guidance.
• Participate in architecture and design reviews, test coverage planning, failure analysis, and automation strategy.
• Collaborate with firmware, QA, release, automation, hardware, and customer-facing teams to resolve system-level issues.
• Drive a quality-first validation culture emphasizing reproducible results, regression coverage, and traceability from requirements to evidence.

Requirements

Must-have skills and experience required for immediate contribution.

• 14+ years industry experience in building, validating, or delivering complex system software with leadership responsibility.
• Experience in firmware, platform software, or low-level system software validation on pre-silicon and silicon platforms.
• Broad system-level understanding across boot flows, hardware/software interfaces, OS interactions, device initialization, and platform services.
• Strong technical judgment in assessing validation trade-offs, managing quality risk, and making release-readiness recommendations.
• Practical knowledge of validation and quality practices: test strategy, coverage planning, CI, regression, automation, defect triage, and reproducibility.
• Excellent communication and cross-team collaboration skills for resolving complex system issues.

Nice-to-have:

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