Modem Software Engineer

About the Role

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. is seeking a motivated engineer to join the Modem Performance and Architecture team within the Modem Power and Performance (MPP) organization. This is a high-visibility individual contributor role with direct impact on Qualcomm’s next-generation modem products and shaping the long-term modem roadmap. You will work in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment across software, hardware, and systems engineering teams to analyze real modem workloads, evaluate architectural trade-offs, and drive measurable improvements in performance, power, and efficiency. The team plays a critical role in ensuring modem designs meet aggressive performance goals and scalability targets across Qualcomm’s expanding product portfolio, including next-generation intelligent edge devices such as AI-Native 6G smartphones, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and IoT devices. Over time, engineers in this position will gain end-to-end exposure to the product lifecycle, from early-stage architectural exploration and pre-silicon analysis through post-silicon validation and commercialization.

Key Responsibilities

As a Modem Performance and Architecture engineer, you will own or contribute to one or more of the following areas:

• Play a key significant role in foundational architectural initiatives influencing multiple future generations of Qualcomm modem and Compute products.
• Contribute to innovations and inventions covering advanced memory architecture and optimization, performance optimization, cache level compression/decompression, and related technologies.
• Address critical challenges across power/performance/area (PPA), memory efficiency, reliability, security, software productivity, and platform scalability while helping shape future modem and DSP roadmaps.
• Help drive strategic initiatives focused on platform robustness, security, and debuggability.
• Define and evaluate SoC-level performance requirements, including latency, throughput, and bandwidth constraints, and assess architectural trade-offs against these requirements.
• Participate in pre-silicon performance evaluations, architectural exploration, and performance sign-off activities.
• Analyze real-world modem workloads to identify performance and efficiency bottlenecks, and propose or implement solutions across software optimization, task design, SW/HW partitioning, cache utilization, and memory behavior.
• Apply data-driven analysis techniques, including traditional ML methods where appropriate, to large performance datasets spanning multiple modem and chipset generations.
• Develop, enhance, and maintain tools for silicon profiling, performance validation, and debug to support the above activities.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
• Strong fundamentals in computer architecture, including processors, memory systems, embedded real-time systems, operating systems, and low-level programming.
• Ability to deliver quantifiable improvements in code performance through techniques including, but not limited to, architectural redesign, compiler optimizations, hardware acceleration, and multithreading.
• Experience working with embedded software development using C/C++ (or ASM) with RTOS schedulers and kernel modules.
• Strong programming capabilities with C (or C++) and Python.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Debug experience using JTAG or equivalent hardware/software debug tools.
• Working knowledge of wireless protocols and technologies.
• Proven ability to collaborate effectively across multi-disciplinary teams.
• Familiarity with traditional machine learning and/or generative AI.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or Electrical Engineering (or foreign academic equivalent) is ideal.
• Up to five (5) years of cumulative work experience in a relevant field.
• Experience contributing to performance analysis, and/or optimization on embedded systems.
• Experience using Python for tooling, data analysis, ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch), or automation.
• Exposure to compiler technology, low-level performance tuning, or system-on-chip (SoC) architecture.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to reason about complex systems.