2+ years of experience with high-performance microprocessor design.
Key Responsibilities
End-to-End System Debug
Lead investigations into critical customer, field, and development issues.
Perform root cause analysis across applications, middleware, RTOS, drivers, firmware, and hardware.
Debug system crashes, hangs, lockups, watchdog resets, memory corruption, data corruption, and performance regressions.
Develop systematic debug methodologies that accelerate issue isolation and resolution.
Application and Middleware Debug
Analyze application failures using logs, traces, profiling tools, debuggers, and instrumentation.
Debug issues involving multi-threaded, real-time, and distributed applications.
Investigate API misuse, resource leaks, synchronization errors, memory corruption, deadlocks, race conditions, and performance bottlenecks.
Correlate application behavior with operating system, driver, and hardware activity.
Partner with software teams to reproduce, isolate, and resolve customer-reported issues.
RTOS and Operating System Debug
Debug scheduler, interrupt, memory management, timer, and synchronization issues.
Analyze real-time performance constraints including latency, jitter, and missed deadlines.
Investigate kernel crashes, task starvation, priority inversion, and resource contention.
Develop diagnostic tools and instrumentation to improve system visibility.
Hardware and Silicon Debug
Debug issues involving processors, memory subsystems, caches, DMA engines, interrupts, and interconnects.
Utilize JTAG, trace systems, protocol analyzers, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and hardware debug tools.
Correlate software symptoms with underlying hardware behavior.
Work with architecture, verification, and silicon teams to identify and resolve complex hardware issues.
Performance Analysis and Optimization
Profile applications and system software to identify bottlenecks.
Analyze CPU utilization, memory bandwidth, cache efficiency, interrupt load, and latency.
Drive improvements in application performance, power efficiency, and system responsiveness.
Develop automation and tooling to support large-scale performance investigations.
Technical Leadership
Serve as the escalation point for the most difficult software and hardware issues.
Mentor engineering teams on debugging techniques and root cause analysis methodologies.
Author debug guides, postmortems, and best practices.
Influence hardware and software architectures to improve observability and diagnosability.
Required Qualifications
BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
Extensive experience debugging embedded and real-time systems.
Expert knowledge of C/C++.
Strong understanding of
Application architecture
Operating systems
RTOS internals
Device drivers
Firmware
Processor architecture
Memory systems
Interrupt architectures
Experience with application debugging tools, profilers, crash analysis tools, and tracing infrastructure.
Strong understanding of multithreading, synchronization, concurrency, and memory management.
Proven track record solving complex problems that span software and hardware boundaries.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with Qualcomm SoCs, DSPs, NPUs, or mobile computing platforms.
Experience with Linux, Android, QNX, FreeRTOS, ThreadX, or Zephyr.
Knowledge of ARM architecture, GIC, cache coherency, DMA, and virtualization technologies.
Experience with performance analysis, power optimization, and silicon bring-up.
Development of custom debug and telemetry tools.
Python or scripting experience for automation.
Ideal Candidate Profile
The successful candidate is the engineer everyone calls when the answer to "where is the bug?" is unknown. They can work their way down the entire stack:
Application → Framework → Middleware → Driver → RTOS → Firmware → Hardware → Silicon and determine with confidence where the fault originated, why it occurred, and how to prevent it from recurring.
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Pay range and Other Compensation & Benefits
$160,200.00 - $240,200.00
The above pay scale reflects the broad, minimum to maximum, pay scale for this job code for the location for which it has been posted. Even more importantly, please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Qualcomm. We also offer a competitive annual discretionary bonus program and opportunity for annual RSU grants (employees on sales-incentive plans are not eligible for our annual bonus). In addition, our highly competitive benefits package is designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play. Your recruiter will be happy to discuss all that Qualcomm has to offer – and you can review more details about our US benefits at this link.
If you would like more information about this role, please contact Qualcomm Careers.
