Sakeena Fiza Helps NVIDIA Hardware Succeed at Scale
When Sakeena Fiza describes her work as a validation engineer at NVIDIA, she does so in terms more befitting a detective story than a world-class engineering lab. “Validation engineers look in the shadows and shine a light into every corner,” Fiza said. “Every time we get a system, our first thought is: how can it […]
Sakeena Fiza, a validation engineer at NVIDIA, describes her role as detective-like, meticulously searching for potential issues in hardware systems. At NVIDIA, the validation team works on AI era systems, investigating components and boards in a lab setting before they are released to the market. Fiza's early memories of working at NVIDIA include the excitement of seeing the NVIDIA Rubin GPU work for the first time, a moment that brought celebration to the entire team.
Validation engineers at NVIDIA ensure that systems function correctly from tray to rack to cluster to production line, exercising hardware to its limits under various real-world conditions. Their goal is to catch any issues before customers encounter them. Fiza and her colleagues often conduct these validations in co-working spaces like Voyager, collaborating to solve problems.
Fiza's journey into hardware engineering began with a fascination for systems, starting with coding via the Logo programming language in Dubai, building Mars rovers in high school, and working on UAVs in college. At NVIDIA, she gets to embody various engineering roles, from mechanical to electrical to firmware engineering, depending on the project.
The challenges she faces range from minor to major, such as high-speed signaling, thermal margins, power integrity, or even seemingly small issues like screws tightened too far or dust levels in facilities.
Validation engineers at NVIDIA don't just chase failures; they investigate the root causes by reproducing issues, varying conditions, probing signals, and analyzing scope shots. A single board may contain tens of thousands of components, while a rack may contain nearly half a million. These parts must work together seamlessly as a single system under stress in various production and deployment scenarios.
For Fiza, the thrill of her work lies in the complexity of AI hardware, which requires a deep understanding of systems engineering. She describes her work as "the Avengers assembling," with teams of architects, designers, software engineers, firmware engineers, and validation engineers all coming together to build a functioning system.
Each project presents a new puzzle and failure mode, providing an opportunity to improve future products. Fiza's passion is evident as she expresses her excitement for the products in the pipeline, believing they will revolutionize the world.
Written by urgent.news from NVIDIA Blog's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
