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Senior Principal CPU Architec
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Senior Principal CPU Architect
Location: Cambridge, UK
Type: Permanent
Experience: 10+ years
About the Role
Our client is looking for a highly experienced Senior Principal CPU Architect to help define the next generations of high-performance CPU architecture.
This is a strategic individual-contributor position focused on long-term CPU architecture, ISA development, advanced microarchitecture, workload analysis, and hardware/software co-design.
You will help shape CPU technologies several years ahead of production and work on computational challenges including Generative AI, LLMs, graph analytics, and confidential computing.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead architectural pathfinding for next-generation CPU designs and technologies.
- Define microarchitectural concepts covering fetch/decode, execution pipelines, out-of-order scheduling, and multi-level memory hierarchies.
- Evaluate and define new ISA capabilities, including vector/matrix extensions and specialised compute instructions.
- Analyse emerging workloads and translate software bottlenecks into microarchitectural requirements.
- Work closely with compiler, operating system, and application software teams on hardware/software co-design.
- Guide development of C++ and Python based cycle-accurate CPU simulation models.
- Evaluate architectural concepts across performance, power, and area.
- Provide senior technical leadership and contribute to longer-term technology roadmaps.
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Requirements
- Extensive industry experience in high-performance CPU architecture.
- Deep understanding of out-of-order execution, branch prediction, register renaming, speculative execution, cache hierarchies, and coherency protocols.
- Strong understanding of ISA design, exception models, memory consistency, and virtualisation.
- Experience with workload profiling, performance counters, and simulation traces.
- Familiarity with tools such as VTune, Perf, SimPoints, or similar performance analysis environments.
- Strong experience developing cycle-accurate architectural simulators using C, C++, and Python.
- MS or PhD in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related discipline.
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Desirable
- Experience delivering multiple high-performance CPU designs through silicon tape-out.
- Experience with x86, Arm, and/or RISC-V.
- Contributions to LLVM, GCC, architectural frameworks, or open ISA communities.
- Knowledge of chiplets, 3D stacking, and advanced semiconductor packaging.
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