Formal Verification Engineer

Full-time · Multiple Levels · US / Canada / India

Nuvacore is building a ground-up high performance, low-power CPU for next-generation compute workloads.  We are seeking Formal Verification Engineers at multiple levels - from Senior Engineer to Principal level - to help prove the Nuvacore CPU correct with formal methods. As part of the design verification (DV) team, you will turn micro-architecture specifications into properties, build the environments to prove them, and use model checking and equivalence checking to exhaustively hunt deep, corner-case bugs - establishing correctness long before silicon, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the design team.

THE ROLE

• Plan & Strategy: Drive the verification scope and formal test plan for each verification problem - turning the micro-architecture specification into the properties to prove.

• Formal Environment: Build the formal environment - assumptions, constraints, assertions, and cover properties - plus reusable, optimized formal models.

• Proof & Bug Hunting: Apply model checking, equivalence checking, and abstraction to reach full or bounded proofs, and hunt deep bugs in areas such as cache coherence, memory consistency, and speculative execution.

• Debug & Design Feedback: Debug counterexamples to root cause and partner directly with designers to fix and improve the micro-architecture.

• Flow & Automation: Build and maintain the end-to-end formal flow - automation (Python/TCL), assertion libraries shared across formal and simulation, and tool-issue resolution with vendors.

• Cross-functional Collaboration: Review formal setups and proofs with the design team, and partner closely across the DV team.

REQUIREMENTS - MUST HAVE

• Degree in Electrical/Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or Mathematics, or equivalent practical experience.

• 15+ years (Principal) or 4+ years (Senior Engineer) of design-verification experience, with hands-on formal verification.

• Hands-on formal techniques - model checking and/or equivalence checking - through to proof convergence.

• Strong Verilog/SystemVerilog and assertions / temporal logic.

• Strong knowledge of CPU micro-architecture and digital logic.

• Strong scripting (Python; TCL/Perl a plus), analytical, and debug skills.

REQUIREMENTS - NICE TO HAVE

• Proficiency with industry formal tools (e.g. Cadence JasperGold, Synopsys VC Formal, Siemens Questa Formal).

• Taking complex verification problems to proof closure - abstraction, bounded-proof management, and equivalence checking (LEC/SEC) against golden references.

• Formal verification of CPU domains such as cache coherence, memory consistency, speculative execution, or data path.

• Security formal verification or theorem proving.

• Understanding of how formal complements dynamic simulation, and shared assertion libraries.

• Mentoring engineers and collaborating across distributed teams.

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$140,000 - $250,000 a year

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