Staff Engineer - FPGA Prototype/Emulation - Platform Software & FPGA Team

Job Title

Staff Engineer - FPGA Prototype/Emulation - Platform Software & FPGA Team

Role Summary

Design and validate FPGA prototyping and emulation platforms to support pre-silicon CPU and SoC validation, software bring-up, and customer prototyping. The role combines FPGA hardware bring-up, system-level validation, and automation to enable shift-left software development.

Experience Level

Senior (Staff Engineer). Experience guidance: typically 3–5 years of hands-on FPGA/emulation platform work as listed in the posting.

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities focus on developing, validating, and supporting FPGA-based prototyping and emulation solutions for CPUs and SoCs.

• Design, build, and enhance FPGA and emulation platforms for single- and multi-core systems, integrating custom and 3rd-party IP.
• Perform pre-silicon validation on FPGA/emulation platforms to verify functionality and meet performance targets.
• Analyze and optimize system performance on FPGA platforms for area and speed.
• Develop tailored prototyping platforms based on project and customer requirements.
• Collaborate with customers to enable rapid prototyping, hardware evaluation, and software development.
• Create and execute pre-silicon validation test plans, including corner cases and debug strategies.
• Integrate, verify, and bring up daughter boards, custom IP, and peripherals in real-time environments.
• Provide technical support and troubleshooting for customer-facing and internal FPGA systems.

Requirements

Key must-have skills and technologies followed by desirable qualifications.

• 3–5 years hands-on experience with FPGA/emulation platforms (examples listed: proFPGA, VPS, Veloce).
• Strong understanding of FPGA architecture, system-level design, and RTL-to-implementation prototyping flow.
• Experience with verification, validation, and debugging of complex system-level issues.
• Board- and system-level bring-up experience for daughter cards, custom IP blocks, and peripherals.
• Familiarity with SoC boot flows and platform initialization for ARM- or RISC-V-based systems.
• Working knowledge of IP subsystems (MIPS, ARM, or RISC-V) and their integration on FPGA platforms.
• Proficient in scripting for automation (Python, Bash, TCL) and comfortable in Windows and Linux environments.
• Experience with digital design tools such as Vivado.

• Experience with CPU or high-complexity pipelined digital logic designs.
• Familiarity with multiple ISAs (RISC-V, ARM64, x86_64) and coherency protocols for multi-core clusters.
• Background in hardware-software co-design and early software bring-up.
• Experience with CI/CD and tools such as Jenkins, Git, and Jira.
• Strong communication and customer-oriented skills.

Education Requirements

Not specified.

About the Company

Company: GlobalFoundries

Headquarters: Saratoga Springs, New York, USA

GlobalFoundries is a leading contract manufacturer for the global semiconductor industry, with facilities in multiple countries, including the USA. The company develops a broad portfolio of semiconductor technologies and employs around 13,000 people worldwide. GlobalFoundries focuses on enhancing competitiveness in specialized application solutions and fostering innovation in mobile communications, consumer electronics, and automotive applications.