Qualcomm
Senior Software Engineer — RISC-V Instruction Set Simulator (Simulator Engineer)
$176K–$263K
Cupertino, California · On-site · Senior · Full-time · Posted Oct 2, 2026
- Experience
- Bachelor's degree: 4+ years; master's degree: 3+ years; PhD: 2+ years in Hardware Engineering, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related work.
- Education
- Bachelor's, master's, or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field.
About the job
Build and maintain a high-performance RISC-V instruction set simulator used as a reference for processor verification and pre-silicon software development.
What you'll do
- Implement RISC-V extensions and maintain simulator execution, memory protection, virtual memory, and privilege logic.
- Develop the ISS/RTL co-simulation harness and targeted specification-based unit tests.
- Maintain simulator extensions and developer utilities.
What they ask for
- Solid C++ skills and ability to read unfamiliar codebases.
- Basic processor architecture knowledge, including pipelines, memory, privilege levels, and interrupts.
- Attention to detail and willingness to translate specifications into tested code.
- Some low-level or systems programming exposure, such as embedded systems, operating systems, compilers, or hardware description.
Nice to have
- Experience with RISC-V, x86, or ARM; simulators or emulators such as QEMU, Spike, or gem5.
- Experience with GDB, ELF binaries, bare-metal bring-up, hardware verification, RTL co-simulation, Linux internals, or Python 3+.
Pay
$175,600.00 - $263,400.00 USD base salary
Tools
C++, RISC-V, QEMU, Spike, gem5, GDB, ELF, Python 3+
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