About the role#
This internship is a 3-month intensive study focused on determining the practical limits of using automated formal methods to guarantee the safety of concurrent kernel primitives. You will work at the intersection of low-level systems engineering and formal verification to bridge the gap between logic and silicon, specifically addressing concurrency, memory models, and automated proof techniques.
What you'll do#
- Formalize locking protocols using tools like TLA+ or Spin to mathematically prove the absence of deadlocks and circular waits.
- Apply Bounded Model Checking (such as ESBMC or CBMC) to C source code to exhaustively scan for data races, pointer safety, and invariant violations.
- Verify the placement of memory barriers to prevent hardware-level synchronization failures on modern CPUs.
- Leverage LLMs as an inference engine to synthesize formal invariants and environment harnesses, while critically auditing the results for logical soundness.
What you'll need#
- Currently pursuing or completed a PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related field with relevant research publications or projects.
- Deep proficiency in C, including the ability to reason about memory alignment, volatile keywords, hardware interrupts, and ARMv8 assembly.
- A visceral understanding of L1/L2 cache coherency (MESI), lock hierarchies, and the behavior of C programs on weak-memory hardware.
- Ability to model software as a discrete state-machine and a preference for proving the absence of bugs over passing individual tests.
- Persistence in troubleshooting complex issues such as state space explosion or model-checker errors.
Location & details#
- Location: San Jose, California.
- Modality: On-site.
- Employment: Full-time, paid internship.
- Base salary range: $38.00 - $46.00 per hour, based on location, skills, experience, and education.
