Sr. Staff Engineer, CPU (Front-End) Verification

We are looking for a Design Verification Engineer to contribute to the unit-level verification of our RISC-V CPU front end—including instruction fetch, branch prediction, and surrounding fetch control structures. As a key individual contributor within our front-end DV team, you will focus on building testbenches, generating stimulus, and developing checkers for complex microarchitectural scenarios.

This role is hybrid, based out of Austin, TX or Santa Clara, CA.

We welcome candidates at various experience levels for this role. During the interview process, candidates will be assessed for the appropriate level, and offers will align with that level, which may differ from the one in this posting.

Who You Are

• Front-End Experience: Solid background verifying CPU front-end blocks—such as instruction fetch, branch predictors (BTB, TAGE, RAS), instruction caches/TLBs, or decode—using SystemVerilog, UVM, and C++.
• Unit-Level Focus: Hands-on experience building clean, controllable unit testbench environments with precise stimulus and checking.
• Reusable Design: Pragmatic approach to building transactors, predictors, and scoreboards that can be reused across verification levels.
• Collaborative Problem Solver: Comfortable working alongside RTL designers to trace and fix misspeculation, redirect, and edge-case fetch bugs.

What We Need

• Unit-Level Verification: Work within the front-end DV team to build and maintain UVM testbenches for instruction fetch units, branch predictors, and related sub-blocks.
• Stimulus Generation: Develop constrained-random and directed tests targeting speculation depth, misprediction/redirect flows, fetch bubbles, and cache/TLB interactions.
• C++ Integration: Help develop and maintain C++ reference models and predictors that integrate into the verification framework for cycle-accurate or transaction-level checking.
• Execution & Closure: Execute verification plans, track functional and code coverage metrics, and ensure edge cases are verified.

What You Will Learn

• RISC-V Front-End Microarchitecture: Practical experience with high-performance RISC-V fetch pipelines and prediction structures.
• Maintainable DV Infrastructure: Strategies for writing unit testbenches that remain manageable as designs evolve.
• Tooling & Workflows: Experience using both industry-standard simulators and open-source flows (e.g., Verilator) across simulation and emulation environments.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Working directly with RTL, performance modeling, and software teams to deliver reliable hardware.

Compensation for all engineers at Tenstorrent ranges from $100k - $500k including base and variable compensation targets. Experience, skills, education, background and location all impact the actual offer made.

Tenstorrent offers a highly competitive compensation package and benefits, and we are an equal opportunity employer.