Research Engineer - CPU / Microarchitecture

Research Engineer - CPU / Microarchitecture We are partnered with a globally renowned research center in the UK looking to expand their team with a CPU Research Engineer to research and develop novel microarchitectural techniques targeting IPC and energy efficiency improvements for next-generation mobile CPUs.

This is a 12-month PAYE engagement based onsite in Cambridge, UK.

Key responsibilities for this CPU Research Engineer position:

• Research and develop novel out-of-order execution techniques to improve IPC and energy efficiency of mobile CPUs.
• Analyse and optimise front-end pipeline stages including branch prediction, fetch, and decode.
• Investigate bottlenecks in the OOO backend — issue queues, register renaming, reorder buffer, and execution units.
• Develop and maintain cycle-accurate microarchitectural simulation models (e.g. gem5) to evaluate OOO design trade-offs.
• Conduct workload characterisation and microarchitectural profiling using hardware performance counters and simulation.
• Evaluate and integrate state-of-the-art academic research into practical CPU design proposals.

Key requirements:

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, or related field.
• Strong knowledge of superscalar processor design, speculative execution, and out-of-order execution.
• Experience with cycle-accurate microarchitecture simulation and performance modelling.
• Strong programming skills in C, C++, Python, and Arm64 or RISC-V assembly.

Keywords:

• CPU Research Engineer
• Microarchitecture
• Out-of-Order Execution
• Branch Prediction
• Superscalar
• gem5
• Cycle-Accurate Simulation
• Mobile CPU
• IPC
• Energy Efficiency
• C
• C++
• Python
• Arm64
• RISC-V
• LLVM
• GCC
• Compiler
• Performance Modelling
• Cambridge
• UK