Staff AI Product Engineer - Firmware & Software

Job Title

Staff AI Product Engineer - Firmware & Software

Role Summary

Senior individual contributor responsible for firmware, controls, and system software for silicon photonics products. Translate photonic device and system requirements into robust control algorithms, firmware, APIs, diagnostics, and manufacturing-ready test capabilities.

Work closely with system architects, electrical engineers, manufacturing, and test teams during bring-up, characterization, debugging, and productization.

Experience Level

Senior (Staff-level). Years of experience not specified in the posting.

Responsibilities

Deliver firmware and system software across the product lifecycle, from engineering bring-up to manufacturing and field service.

• Architect, develop, and maintain embedded firmware for control and management of silicon photonics products.
• Interface firmware with photonic devices, ASICs/FPGAs, DACs/ADCs, sensors, power-management devices, and board-level electronics.
• Implement closed-loop control algorithms for optical operating points, temperature, power, bias, alignment, switching state, and other device-specific variables.
• Design real-time and event-driven firmware, state machines, and fault-handling/recovery mechanisms.
• Develop device initialization, calibration, configuration, monitoring, and nonvolatile storage strategies.
• Support remote firmware/software update mechanisms, configuration management, and versioning.
• Develop automated calibration and test capabilities suitable for transition into manufacturing.
• Support production test, system qualification, reliability testing, and failure analysis; implement diagnostics for rapid isolation of failures.
• Design for reliability, testability, manufacturability, and field serviceability.

Requirements

Must-have skills and experience (concise):

• Significant professional experience developing firmware and software for complex embedded systems.
• Strong C/C++ expertise for embedded targets; experience with Python or similar for automation, test, and data analysis.
• Deep understanding of embedded processors/microcontrollers, memory architectures, interrupts, timing, concurrency, and hardware interfaces.
• Experience with RTOS and/or embedded Linux environments.
• Proven experience developing software that directly controls physical hardware, including hardware bring-up and automated test.
• Strong understanding of feedback and closed-loop control systems; experience implementing calibration and compensation algorithms.
• Familiarity with DACs/ADCs, temperature sensors, power-management devices, ASICs/FPGAs, and protocols such as SPI, I2C, UART, GPIO, and Ethernet.
• System-level debugging skills across hardware and software boundaries; ability to read schematics and collaborate with electrical engineers.
• Ability to convert loosely defined system requirements into robust firmware/software architectures and implementations.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience with silicon photonics or photonic device control.

Education Requirements

BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Controls Engineering, Physics, or a related technical discipline.

About the Company

Company: PsiQuantum

Headquarters: Palo Alto, CA, United States

PsiQuantum develops silicon-photonic quantum computers aimed at building million-qubit, fault-tolerant systems. Founded in 2016, the company combines semiconductor manufacturing processes, photonic hardware, and quantum software to scale quantum systems for commercial and government applications.