Staff Software Engineer
Software Engineering
Portland, OR, USA · Austin, TX, USA
Posted on Nov 6, 2026
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