Principal Systems Validation Engineer

At MaxLinear, we're building the next generation of high-performance silicon powering data centers, AI platforms, cloud infrastructure, and advanced storage solutions. We are looking for an exceptional Principal Systems Validation Engineer to serve as the technical leader responsible for validating cutting-edge PCIe-based accelerator technologies from concept to production.  

This is a highly visible role where you'll influence architecture, drive silicon quality, solve technically complex challenges, and help bring industry-leading products to market. You'll work alongside some of the brightest engineers across architecture, design, firmware, PHY, software, and system teams while defining validation strategies that enable world-class performance and reliability.  

Lead the end-to-end PCIe validation strategy across both pre-silicon and post-silicon phases, ensuring our flagship accelerator products meet the highest standards of performance, compliance, and customer readiness.  

Drive validation and bring-up activities across advanced PCIe generations, helping shape solutions that push the boundaries of bandwidth, scalability, and system performance.  

Investigate and resolve complex hardware and software interactions using advanced PCIE protocol analyzers, PCIE exercisers, oscilloscopes etc. Become the technical authority engineers turn to when challenges seem impossible.

Debug link training and stability issues using LTSSM analysis, firmware logs, register dumps, protocol traces, electrical captures, and controlled experiments.

Lead PCI-SIG compliance efforts, interoperability testing, and large-scale ecosystem validation to ensure seamless operation across server and platform environments.  

Build and enhance modern validation frameworks using Python or equivalent scripting, enabling rapid debugging, greater test coverage, and faster product development cycles.  

Collaborate closely with architecture, design, firmware, software, manufacturing, and customer engineering teams to drive technical decisions and product success throughout the development lifecycle.  

Provide technical guidance, coaching, and leadership to engineers across the organization, helping build a culture of engineering excellence.  

You are an accomplished validation leader with deep expertise in PCIe technology and complex SoC environments. You thrive on solving difficult technical challenges and influencing products that ship at scale. 

• 12+ years of experience in silicon, platform, or system validation
• Expert knowledge of PCIe architecture, protocol layers, power management, link training, equalization, and compliance testing
• Hands-on experience validating high-speed SerDes interfaces and large-scale system platforms
• Experience with Linux-based bring-up, low-level register debug, diagnostic utilities, and production validation flows
• Exceptional debugging skills spanning hardware, firmware, and software domains
• Experience bringing complex silicon products from first silicon through production
• Strong automation and software development skills in Python, C, C++, or related languages
• The ability to lead cross-functional teams and influence technical direction across organizations

• Deep expertise with PCIe Gen4, Gen5, and emerging next-generation standards
• Experience in AI, networking, storage, data center, or cloud infrastructure products
• Familiarity with board-level design, signal integrity validation, and manufacturing test methodologies
• Knowledge of advanced data compression, security, or cryptographic technologies

MaxLinear is a global, NASDAQ-traded company (MXL) where the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well. We are a fabless system-on-chip product company, striving to improve the world’s communication networks for everyone through our highly integrated radio-frequency (RF), analog, digital, and mixed-signal semiconductor solutions for access and connectivity, wired and wireless infrastructure, and industrial and multi-market applications.

We hire the best people in the industry and engage them in some of the most exciting opportunities that connect the world we live in today. Our growth has come from innovative, bold approaches to solving some of the world’s most challenging communication technology problems in the most efficient and effective manner.

MaxLinear began by developing the world’s first high-performance TV tuner chip using standard CMOS process technology. Others said we couldn’t achieve the extremely high-performance requirements using CMOS, but we proved them wrong and achieved enduring global market leadership with our designs. Since then, we’ve developed a full line of products that drive 4G and 5G infrastructure; enable data center, metro and long-haul optical interconnects; bring 10Gbit to the home; power the IoT revolution; and enable robust and reliable communication in harsh industrial environments. Over the years, we’ve expanded through organic growth and through several acquisitions that have perfectly complemented our existing portfolio and enabled us to deliver complete end-to-end solutions in our target markets. One such example was the acquisition of Intel’s Home Gateway Platform Division that added Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and Broadband Gateway Processor SoC technology to our connected home portfolio creating a complete and scalable platform of connectivity and access solutions to fully address our customers’ needs.

Our headquarters are in Carlsbad, near San Diego, California. We also have major design centers in Irvine and San Jose, California; Valencia, Spain; Bangalore, India; Munich, Germany; Israel; and Singapore.

We have approximately 1,200 employees, a substantial majority of whom have engineering degrees and include masters and Ph.D. graduates from many of the premiere universities around the world. Our employees thrive on innovation, outstanding execution, outside-the-box thinking, nimbleness, and collaboration. Together, we form a high-energy business team that is focused on building the best and most innovative products on the market.