CPU Design & Verification Engineer — New College Grad

At NUVACORE we're designing a new general-purpose CPU core for the sustained, intensive demands of AI infrastructure and agentic computing, not the workloads of the past. We are seeking new college graduates to join our CPU team, contributing to either Design Verification (DV) or RTL/micro-architecture design. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with architects, RTL designers, and verification engineers across units including fetch, decode/rename, scalar execute, fp/vector execute, load/store, memory management/TLB, prefetching, debug/trace, system/IO, and the multi-level cache subsystem — helping build and prove out a CPU that targets industry-leading power, performance, and area.

THE ROLE

Depending on your interests and team placement, you'll contribute to one or both of the following

Design Verification

• Help build test plans, environments, stimulus generators, checkers, transactors, and coverage that exercise the CPU pipeline end to end.
• Write and debug directed and random tests in assembly, C, or random instruction sequences (RIS) to expose corner cases such as speculation, hazards, flushes, and retirement ordering.
• Partner with architects to correlate RTL against performance models and help identify throughput, stall, and branch-prediction issues.
• Contribute to functional coverage monitors and help analyze metrics toward test plan closure.
• Work with architecture and RTL teams to root-cause failures and support emulation, FPGA, and silicon bring-up.

RTL / Micro-Architecture Design

• Contribute to micro-architecture development, working with the performance modeling team to help converge early designs into detailed specifications.
• Develop and refine RTL targeting power, performance, area, and timing goals.
• Support verification efforts including testbench development, formal methods, and simulation/emulation.
• Assist in performance exploration and correlation, working with performance architecture and verification teams.
• Collaborate with the physical design team to help meet timing, power, area, DFT, and reliability goals.

REQUIREMENTS — MUST HAVE

• BS or MS in Electrical/Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience (recent or upcoming graduate).
• Coursework or project experience in digital logic and computer architecture — pipelines, out-of-order execution, branch prediction, or similar topics.
• Proficiency in C/C++, SystemVerilog, and/or Verilog, plus familiarity with a scripting language (Python preferred; Perl a plus).
• Exposure to functional verification concepts (testbenches, checkers, coverage) or RTL design/coding, through coursework, internships, or personal projects.
• Strong fundamentals in CPU micro-architecture concepts.

REQUIREMENTS — NICE TO HAVE

• Internship or project experience in CPU/complex digital design, verification, or RTL development.
• Exposure to RISC-V, ARM64, or x86 ISA and their impact on micro-architectural choices.
• Experience with assembly-level programming or writing tests in assembly.
• Familiarity with constrained-random verification, coverage-driven closure, or assertions/formal verification.
• Exposure to emulation/FPGA environments, waveform debug, or silicon bring-up.
• Interest or coursework in one or more specialization areas: instruction fetch, branch prediction, decode/rename, out-of-order execution, load/store, cache and memory subsystems, memory coherence, or power management.
• Strong preference for being located at one of our main offices in Austin or Santa Clara

The next great CPU won't build itself. We’re assembling a world-class team across every layer of CPU development, from architecture and design to verification, physical implementation, software, infrastructure, and product delivery. Every discipline matters, and every person has the opportunity to help shape the technology from the ground up.