
Graphcore designs Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) purpose-built to accelerate machine learning and AI workloads. The company is looking for a 2026 Platform QA Intern, based in Bristol. This software engineering position is part of the UK's expanding AI semiconductors landscape.
At Graphcore, we’re building the future of AI compute.
We’re a team of semiconductor, software and AI experts, with deep experience in creating the complete AI compute stack - from silicon and software to infrastructure at datacenter scale.
As part of the SoftBank Group, backed by significant long-term investment, we are delivering key technology into the fast-growing SoftBank AI ecosystem. To meet the vast and exciting AI opportunity, Graphcore is expanding its teams around the world. We are bringing together the brightest minds to solve the toughest problems, in a place where everyone has the opportunity to make an impact on the company, our products and the future of artificial intelligence.
We are looking for an intern to join our Platform Quality Assurance group. You will learn how to creatively exercise our product and provide feedback to the engineering delivery and product management teams. This helps them make decisions about engineering effort and the trajectory of the product. Working in either the component Quality Assurance team you will develop a close working relationship with the relevant development teams; or working in the integration Quality Assurance exercising the aggregated and composed system at a much larger scale with a bias towards informing the product management team.
You will provide valuable observations and measurements of the product, looking beyond the natural focus of the delivery and product teams, painting a comprehensive behavioural picture of the product in typical and atypical scenarios.
Essential:
We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences; we’re committed to building an inclusive work environment that makes Graphcore a great home for everyone. We offer an equal opportunity process and understand that there are visible and invisible differences in all of us. We can provide a flexible approach to interview and encourage you to chat to us if you require any reasonable adjustments.
Graphcore is a Bristol-based AI semiconductor company founded in 2016 by serial semiconductor entrepreneurs Nigel Toon and Simon Knowles. Toon previously led XMOS and Picochip, while Knowles co-founded Element14 (acquired by Broadcom) and Icera (acquired by NVIDIA for $435M). The company developed Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), novel AI accelerators designed from the ground up for machine learning workloads, alongside the proprietary Poplar graph programming framework. Graphcore raised $767M in total funding, reaching a $2.77B valuation, with backing from Sequoia Capital, Atomico, Amadeus, Microsoft, and others. In July 2024, SoftBank Group acquired Graphcore for approximately $500M to $600M. The company continues to operate from Bristol with plans to expand its UK headcount to 750.