Principal FPGA Engineer

About the role

The Multi-Product Power & Digital (MPD) department designs FPGAs, circuit cards, and electronics subassemblies for a range of products including missiles/effectors, radars, and electronic warfare systems. The team leverages digital, analog, and power design skills to provide support throughout the product lifecycle from architecture and design through production and sustainment.

Responsibilities

• Provide full lifecycle support of production quality FPGA designs for all major vendors and device families including AMD (Xilinx), Altera, and Microchip (Microsemi) using tools such as AMD Vivado, Altera Quartus Prime Pro or Libero.
• Generate FPGA designs for the following applications: gigabit and multigigabit transceiver (MGT) serial interfaces, Radio Frequency (RF) DSP, controls, data links, embedded processing and processor interfaces.
• Translate system level requirements into FPGA requirements
• Architect FPGA-based systems to determine parts, interfaces, and Concept of Operations (CONOPS)
• Lead small teams of FPGA engineers and code in VHDL for reliability and maintainability
• Verify designs utilizing self-checking techniques with directed and constrained random tests, while tracking functional and code coverage
• Define schedules for FPGA tasking and drive execution to the planned budget and schedule
• Identify and manage project risks and opportunities
• Create complete documentation including requirements, verification plan, and user’s guides
• Lead medium sized teams to success
• Coach, review, and delegate work to junior engineers
• Serve as a subject-matter expert within discipline
• Lead internal and external technical reviews
• Support customer interactions and relations
• Contribute to product and technology roadmaps
• Make improvements to processes, systems or products to enhance overall performance
• Engage in personal technical growth and facilitate technical growth in peers and junior engineers

Requirements

• You must have a degree in Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) and a minimum of 8 years of prior relevant experience.
• Experience to include one or more of the following: FPGA/ASIC design (VHDL and/or Verilog coding), FPGA/ASIC verification (System Verilog coding), experience with AMD (Xilinx), Altera and/or Microchip (Microsemi) devices and tools such as AMD Vivado, Altera Quartus Prime Pro or Libero, hands on experience with integration and debug of FPGA/ASIC in a lab environment, experience with timing closure, clock domain crossing and reset domain crossing analysis, constraint development, experience with source code management, design reviews, and code release in a team development environment.
• One or more advanced degrees in Electrical Engineering or a related Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics (STEM) major may be counted as 2 years of work experience.
• Experience in one or more of the following areas: Radar processing techniques, Image processing techniques for visual and infrared sensors, Embedded systems design using ARM, Microblaze, or NIOS processors, Gigabit serial interfaces and multi-gigabit transceivers (MGTs), Constrained random verification in UVM using System Verilog, Verification utilizing emulation platforms, such as Veloce, Experience with High Level Synthesis (HLS), Experience with vector processors and/or GPUs, Using AI to improve FPGA workflows (verification automation, log triage, regression analytics), AI/ML inference on FPGA (Vitis AI, FINN, custom accelerators).
• Demonstrated ability to lead successful teams, experience managing technical, cost, and schedule risks and opportunities, experience with project management tools such as Earned Value and/or Agile Execution, experience communicating and documenting technical topics and presenting to customers and management, experience leading a program transition from development to production, proposal development experience, experience with intellectual property generation (patents & publications), demonstrated mentorship of junior engineers.