Software Engineer - Performance Tooling

Job Overview:

This is a technical role for an emerging software engineer who enjoys solving hard problems, testing assumptions, breaking systems in creative ways, and using frontier AI development practices to move faster.

You will be joining the Observe and Accelerate team, responsible for creating performance analysis toolkits used across Arm solutions. These tools help engineering teams understand how software behaves, performance characteristics, and how workloads can be observed, analysed and accelerated on Arm platforms, including cloud, edge and physical deployments.

This role is focused on pioneering a new way of validating software. The goal is not simply to validate that software works, but to find convincing ways to demonstrate where it does not. You will use AI-assisted development workflows and orchestrate AI agents to explore systems, generate tests, investigate behaviour, analyse performance, and expose weaknesses in software before customers or downstream teams do.

We are looking for someone early in their career, typically with 1-2 years of software engineering experience, a strong Computer Science background, and evidence of strong academic achievement. Depth of industry experience is not expected, but we care deeply about sharp thinking, technical curiosity, ownership, adaptability and a willingness to learn quickly.

This role would suit someone who enjoys writing software, understanding system behaviour, working with performance tools, and finding creative ways to stress, challenge and improve complex software systems.

Responsibilities:

• Developing software, tooling and automation to help improve performance analysis products and toolkits used by our customers

• Using modern AI development workflows and tools such as Claude Code, Codex or similar systems to accelerate engineering tasks

• Orchestrating AI agents to investigate software behaviour, generate tests, identify edge cases and expose defects

• Designing practical ways to challenge software systems, including negative testing, adversarial scenarios, workload variation and failure analysis

• Building automated workflows that help demonstrate where software is fragile, incorrect, incomplete or underperforming

• Working with engineering teams to understand product intent, expected behaviour, performance goals and validation requirements

• Creating benchmarks, experiments and test workloads to analyse software behaviour across different conditions

• Using profiling, tracing, benchmarking and system analysis tools to identify performance issues and unexpected behaviour

• Investigating technical issues, identifying root causes and proposing practical improvements

• Writing clear, maintainable code in one or more general-purpose programming languages

• Creating scripts, tools and automation to support repeatable analysis and validation workflows

• Developing a strong understanding of Arm platforms, software performance, system behaviour and emerging AI-assisted engineering practices

Required Skills and Experience :

• 1-2 years of software engineering experience, or equivalent practical experience through internships, research, open-source or meaningful academic projects

• Computer Science degree or closely related technical degree

• Strong academic pedigree, with evidence of high technical ability and strong fundamentals

• Familiarity with common AI-assisted development practices and tools

• Proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language, such as C, Java, Rust, .NET or similar

• Proficiency in at least one scripting language, such as Python or similar

• Strong technical problem-solving skills, with the ability to reason from first principles and learn new systems quickly

• Curiosity about how software fails, not just how it works

• Ability to design practical experiments that expose defects, regressions, performance issues or unexpected behaviour

• Comfortable working in ambiguous technical areas where requirements may be incomplete or evolving

• Motivation, adaptability and a willingness to take on new technical challenges

• Practical experience using Linux command-line tools and debugging technical issues in software systems

“Nice To Have” Skills and Experience :

• Experience with performance analysis, profiling, benchmarking or optimisation

• Familiarity with perf, Intel VTune, Linux tracing tools such as perf, benchmark harnesses or similar

• Experience building test frameworks, validation tools, automation systems or developer productivity tooling

• Experience using AI agents to automate software engineering, debugging or analysis workflows

• Understanding of systems performance, compiler behaviour, runtime behaviour, operating systems or computer architecture

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, regression analysis or software quality workflows

• Experience contributing to software development projects, open-source projects or research prototypes

• Interest in Arm architecture, performance engineering or low-level systems behaviour

Additional Information

Please note that no relocation package is available for this role.

Accommodations at Arm

At Arm, we want to build extraordinary teams. If you need an adjustment or an accommodation during the recruitment process, please email accommodations@arm.com. To note, by sending us the requested information, you consent to its use by Arm to arrange for appropriate accommodations. All accommodation or adjustment requests will be treated with confidentiality, and information concerning these requests will only be disclosed as necessary to provide the accommodation. Although this is not an exhaustive list, examples of support include breaks between interviews, having documents read aloud, or office accessibility. Please email us about anything we can do to accommodate you during the recruitment process.

Hybrid Working at Arm

Arm’s approach to hybrid working is designed to create a working environment that supports both high performance and personal wellbeing. We believe in bringing people together face to face to enable us to work at pace, whilst recognizing the value of flexibility. Within that framework, we empower groups/teams to determine their own hybrid working patterns, depending on the work and the team’s needs. Details of what this means for each role will be shared upon application. In some cases, the flexibility we can offer is limited by local legal, regulatory, tax, or other considerations, and where this is the case, we will collaborate with you to find the best solution. Please talk to us to find out more about what this could look like for you.

Equal Opportunities at Arm

Arm is an equal opportunity employer, committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal opportunities are available to all applicants and colleagues. We are a diverse organization of dedicated and innovative individuals, and don’t discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.