European Tech Recruit
CPU Research Engineer
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
CPU Research Engineer – Contract
Location: Cambridge, UK
Working arrangement: Onsite
Employment type: Contractor
We are supporting a leading technology organisation in Cambridge that is looking for an experienced CPU Research Engineer to join a highly specialised processor architecture team.
The position will focus on researching and evaluating new CPU microarchitectural techniques, with particular emphasis on out-of-order execution, instruction-level parallelism and performance-per-watt optimisation for mobile processors.
Responsibilities
- Research and develop new out-of-order execution techniques to improve CPU IPC and energy efficiency.
- Analyse and optimise CPU frontend pipeline stages, including branch prediction, instruction fetch and decode.
- Investigate performance bottlenecks across the out-of-order backend, including issue queues, register renaming, reorder buffers and execution units.
- Develop, extend and maintain cycle-accurate microarchitectural simulation models.
- Evaluate CPU design trade-offs using tools such as gem5, Sniper, ChampSim or similar internal simulation platforms.
- Propose practical microarchitectural enhancements targeting performance-per-watt improvements.
- Conduct workload characterisation and microarchitectural profiling using simulation data and hardware performance counters.
- Analyse mobile and compute-intensive workloads to identify architectural limitations and optimisation opportunities.
- Review state-of-the-art academic research and translate relevant concepts into practical CPU design proposals.
- Collaborate with CPU architects, compiler engineers, performance engineers and other research teams.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
Required Experience
- Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics or a related technical field.
- Strong knowledge of advanced computer architecture, superscalar processors and out-of-order execution.
- Deep understanding of speculative execution, branch prediction and instruction-level parallelism.
- Experience with cycle-accurate microarchitecture simulation and performance modelling.
- Strong programming skills in C, C++ and Python.
- Experience with Arm64, AArch64 or RISC-V assembly language.
- Understanding of compiler principles, including instruction scheduling, register allocation and code generation.
- Experience conducting workload profiling, benchmark analysis or performance-counter-based investigations.
- Ability to independently research complex technical topics and translate findings into implementable architectural proposals.
Desirable Experience
- Experience developing or modifying gem5, Sniper, ChampSim or similar detailed CPU simulators.
- Knowledge of advanced branch predictors, instruction prefetchers and data prefetching mechanisms.
- Experience with LLVM or GCC backend development.
- Knowledge of profile-guided optimisation and feedback-directed optimisation.
- Experience implementing custom ISA extensions or compiler support for new architectural features.
- Experience with operating-system kernel development, scheduling or memory-management internals.
- Knowledge of binary translation, dynamic binary instrumentation or JIT compilation.
- Familiarity with Arm security technologies such as CFI, PAC, BTI or MTE.
- Experience integrating ISA simulators with compiler or software toolchains.
- Knowledge of processing-in-memory, near-data processing or chiplet-based architectures.
- Understanding of domain-specific processors and accelerator-compiler co-design.
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
Candidate Profile
The successful candidate will be highly independent, research-driven and comfortable working on complex, open-ended CPU architecture problems.
This opportunity would particularly suit someone with experience in CPU microarchitecture research, processor performance modelling, out-of-order core development or advanced computer architecture simulation.
The role is based onsite in Cambridge and is offered on a contract basis.
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Skills