Field Applications Engineer (FAE)

About the Role

Altera is seeking a highly skilled Field Applications Engineer (FAE) to support customers adopting our industry-leading FPGA, SoC, and embedded solutions. In this role, you will partner closely with customers, sales teams, and product engineering to drive successful design-ins, accelerate time-to-market, and ensure customers realize the full value of Altera’s technology portfolio. This is a customer-facing, technically deep role ideal for engineers who enjoy solving complex system-level challenges and influencing next-generation semiconductor designs.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary technical interface for customers evaluating and designing with Altera FPGAs, SoCs, IP, and software tools.
• Understand customer architectures, performance requirements, and design constraints to recommend optimal device families, IP blocks, and development flows.
• Deliver technical presentations, hands-on workshops, and product demonstrations tailored to customer needs.
• Guide customers through feasibility analysis, device selection, and early-stage design decisions.
• Support customers through the full design cycle — from concept and RTL development to timing closure, power optimization, and board bring-up.
• Troubleshoot complex issues involving FPGA logic, embedded processors, high-speed interfaces, memory subsystems, and power architectures.
• Develop reference designs, application notes, and best-practice guides to accelerate customer success.
• Collaborate with internal engineering teams to reproduce issues, validate fixes, and influence roadmap priorities.
• Partner with sales teams to support opportunity qualification, competitive positioning, and technical strategy.
• Provide structured feedback to product management and engineering on customer requirements, emerging use cases, and competitive trends.
• Represent Altera at customer meetings, industry events, and technical conferences.
• Maintain deep knowledge of Altera’s FPGA architectures, Quartus toolchain, IP portfolio, and embedded software ecosystem.
• Stay current on industry trends in AI/ML acceleration, high-performance compute, networking, automotive, and industrial applications.
• Mentor internal teams and contribute to technical enablement programs.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field.
• 10+ years of experience in FPGA design, digital logic design, embedded systems, or applications engineering.
• Strong proficiency in RTL (Verilog/VHDL), timing analysis, synthesis, and FPGA implementation flows.
• Experience with high-speed interfaces (PCIe, DDR, Ethernet), embedded processors, or board-level design.
• Excellent communication, presentation, and customer-facing skills.
• Ability to travel to customer sites as needed.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with Altera/Intel Quartus, Platform Designer, and associated IP.
• Familiarity with AI/ML acceleration, DSP, or hardware/software co-design.
• Experience supporting enterprise customers or large-scale deployments.
• Strong debugging skills using logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and embedded debug tools.

Pay

The compensation below is reflective of a sales role that includes a salary + incentive. Actual compensation may vary based on job location, job-related knowledge, skills, experiences, and trainings.

$187K - $270.7K USD

Schedule

Shift 1 (United States of America)

Location

Primary Location: San Jose, California, United States

Additional Locations: Various (not specified)

Applicants must be eligible for any required U.S. export authorizations.