Staff Software Engineer

Responsibilities

Deep Technical Ownership

• Area of expertise: Bring deep, hands-on expertise in at least one area of systems software and apply it directly to customer and AHC workloads.

• Workload analysis and tuning: Profile, analyze and tune real-world workloads (e.g., gaming, video, audio, low-latency streaming, dynamic translation). Dive into C/C++, assembly, drivers and hardware interfaces to find and fix bottlenecks.

• Benchmarking infrastructure: Build clean, reproducible performance environments and automated test harnesses for true apples-to-apples comparisons between execution environments (e.g., x86 vs. RISC-V, native vs. translated runtimes).

• Performance characterization: Measure and characterize hardware performance on real workloads, and feed findings back to architecture and software teams.

Customer Enablement

• Technical interface: Serve as a trusted technical point person for sales teams, supporting AHC's sales initiatives to break down barriers to adoption that may arise from a perceived (or real) lack of pre-existing software stacks. Also serve as a trusted technical point person for vendor partners and open-source communities.

• Project completion: Work side by side with customer teams to port, integrate and tune their software. Diagnose integration bugs and staffing roadblocks, resolve escalations, and land high-stakes projects on time.

• Technical communication: Run brown bag sessions, present architecture walk-throughs, and document performance findings for customers, partners and AHC leadership.

Internal Initiatives

• Greenfield initiatives: Lead initiatives that incubate internal tools, platforms or workflows that speed up AHC's architecture, software and validation teams, from idea through adoption.

• Leading without authority: Drive technical consensus and get work done across hardware, compiler, runtime and application teams without direct reporting lines, including in areas where you are not the domain expert.

• Influence and best practices: Identify opportunities for, and promote, better engineering practices across C/C++ and low-level software projects while staying mindful of existing deadlines (e.g., refactoring legacy codebases, unit testing, API stability).

• Process and efficiency: Identify workflow bottlenecks, streamline development and release processes, build developer utilities, and optimize CI/CD pipelines to improve iteration speed.

Qualifications & Skills

Required

• Senior experience: 12+ years of software engineering in low-level systems programming, runtime environments, OS internals or performance-critical applications.

• Core languages: Mastery of C and C++, with strong Python (or similar) for automation and tool development.

• Systems fundamentals: Low-level systems APIs on Linux and/or Windows: memory management, thread synchronization, hardware acceleration interfaces, dynamic library loading.

• Performance tuning: Track record of building automated test harnesses, benchmarks and profiling infrastructure to evaluate system efficiency and throughput.

• Customer facing: Hands-on experience working directly with customer engineering teams to debug live issues, manage escalations and deliver joint milestones.

• Leadership without authority: Proven ability to anchor cross-team initiatives, lead engineers who don't report to you, and establish engineering standards.

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred

• Gaming, video or audio software experience, for example:

• Media frameworks: FFmpeg, GStreamer, DirectShow, Media Foundation

• Audio stacks: WASAPI, ALSA, Core Audio

• Graphics and games: DirectX, Vulkan, game engines, graphics framebuffers

• Translation and embedded: Experience with dynamic translation engines, emulation or embedded systems.

• Tooling: Profiling tools (e.g., perf, VTune, custom tracing harnesses) and CI/CD frameworks (e.g., Jenkins, Concourse, GitHub Actions).

• Runtimes: C# / .NET runtimes, virtual machines (JVM, V8, etc.) or cross-language native wrappers.

Why You'd Want to Join

• Shape a new platform: Help customers and partners adopt AHC's RISC-V technology by building the software paths that make it real for their workloads.

• Broad, visible impact: Your work spans customer engagements, hardware performance characterization and internal tooling, and is seen by customers, partners and AHC leadership.

• Greenfield ownership: Take internal initiatives from idea through adoption and set the engineering practices a growing group will build on.

• Influence by expertise: Lead through technical credibility across hardware, compiler, runtime and application teams, and help shape the group's hiring.

What We Offer

• Lead impactful architecture decisions shaping next-generation heterogeneous computing

• Competitive compensation & benefits package

• Collaboration with talented engineers passionate about cutting-edge CPU technologies.

• Opportunities for professional growth in an innovative, fast-paced environment

• A flexible and inclusive work culture