Staff/Principal Validation Engineer

Job Title

Staff/Principal Validation Engineer

Role Summary

Lead a validation focus group within Arm's System Solutions software organization responsible for system readiness, software quality, release confidence, and customer-facing robustness for Neoverse-based platforms. Work spans pre-silicon verification through silicon bring-up and production firmware/software delivery.

This role combines technical leadership, hands-on validation strategy, and people management to define validation approaches, evidence requirements, and risk assessments across complex platform deliverables.

Experience Level

Senior — requires substantial leadership and technical experience; specific posting requests 14+ years of industry experience in system software validation, delivery, or related roles.

Responsibilities

The role owns validation strategy and execution across pre-silicon and silicon stages and leads a team that delivers validation plans and release evidence.

• Set direction and priorities for the validation team; hire, coach, and develop engineers and delegate to meet delivery goals.
• Define and own validation approaches for FVP, emulation, FPGA, RTL co-validation, bring-up boards, CRBs, and production environments; specify required evidence at each stage.
• Participate in architecture and design reviews; review validation plans, coverage, failure analysis, automation, and critical defects.
• Contribute hands-on to debug and unblock complex system issues when required.
• Coordinate validation activities with firmware, QA, release, automation, hardware, and customer-facing teams; represent validation in platform-level decisions.
• Drive a quality-first culture: define entry/exit criteria, regression coverage, reproducibility, traceability, and clear release-readiness evidence.

Requirements

Must-have skills and experience required to perform the role; a separate list of desirable skills follows.

• 14+ years industry experience building, validating, or delivering complex system software, with proven people leadership and delivery track record.
• Experience validating firmware, platform software, or low-level system software on pre-silicon and silicon platforms; experience on Arm-based systems preferred.
• Broad system-level understanding across boot flows, hardware/software interfaces, OS interactions, device initialization, platform services, and production-readiness requirements.
• Strong technical judgment in assessing validation trade-offs, managing quality risk, prioritizing coverage, and advising on release readiness.
• Hands-on knowledge of validation and quality practices: test strategy, coverage planning, CI, regression, automation, defect triage, reproducibility, and release criteria.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across distributed teams and multiple engineering groups.

Nice-to-have:

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