At NVIDIA, validation engineer Sakeena Fiza describes her job in terms of a detective story: she and her colleagues look for the ways a system might break, then work to solve the mystery of why it failed. The goal, she says, is to catch issues before customers do. The work begins in the lab when a new system first receives power, with components brought up one by one and teams watching for the first signs of life. Fiza remembers the collective celebration when a Rubin GPU first enumerated at a system level—the first time the hardware identified itself to the software stack.
The failures she chases can be immense or microscopic. A rack-scale problem might involve high-speed signaling, thermal margins, or power integrity; another might come down to a screw tightened too far or the level of dust in a customer facility. A single board may contain tens of thousands of components, and a rack may approach half a million. Those parts must behave as one system under stress, at scale, across diverse AI factory configurations. Fiza says she gets to act as a mechanical, electrical, and firmware engineer as needed, because validation sits at the intersection of all those disciplines.
Fiza came to NVIDIA after studying computer science and engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and her path into hardware was shaped by early coding in Dubai, a high school robotics camp building Mars rovers, and college work on unmanned aerial vehicles. She was drawn to data center systems because it meant working with the whole machine. She compares bring-up to the Avengers assembling, with architects, designers, and engineers all in the room racing toward a working system, and says she is never alone at work. With products in the pipeline, she is excited about what they will do.