Senior Hardware Engineer - Cambridge MA

About the role

Are you excited about building the next generation of cloud servers? Do you enjoy hands-on hardware bring-up? Join our Server Team! Our Hardware Engineering team designs, qualifies, and scales the server platforms that power Akamai Cloud. We partner closely with OEM/ODM manufacturers to deliver reliable, efficient, and secure platforms from concept through global deployment. Partner with the best You will develop new server platforms optimized for cloud workloads, and GPU-accelerated configurations for AI inference. You will be at the forefront of the server lifecycle managing architecture, design for manufacturability, bring-up, validation, and release ensuring our platforms meet demanding performance, cost, and reliability targets.

Responsibilities

• Owning platform development for compute and GPU servers.
• Defining requirements, review schematics/layouts, guide DFM, and drive platform NPI from EVT DVT PVT MP.
• Leading bring-up and debug of boards and systems (power, thermal, storage, networking, manageability)
• Developing and execute validation plans, root-cause issues across HW/FW/SW.
• Collaborating with partners (OEM/ODM, silicon, and component suppliers) to develop platform configurations that balance performance, efficiency, supply continuity, and TCO.
• Managing component firmware/BIOS/OpenBMC feature sets (performance/power/thermal, secure boot, provisioning, telemetry)
• Qualifying key technologies: PCIe Gen5/Gen6 GPUs, CPUs, NICs, DPUs, NVMe drives, DRAM.
• Designing and validating GPU platforms including PCIe/NVLink/UALink topologies, power/thermal envelopes, and reliability considerations for GPUs.

Requirements

• 8 years of relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering or a related field
• Foundation in server architecture and board-level design/debug.
• Comfortable with low-level buses and tools (IC, SPI, UART, oscilloscopes).
• Practical experience with platform validation (power/thermal, signal integrity, storage and PCIe/NVMe qualification, system stress).
• Proficient in Linux and scripting (Python, Bash). Ability to automate tests, parse logs, and build data-driven