Hardware Engineer, FPGA

The role

You will bring physics-inspired ASIC designs to life on FPGA platforms for pre-silicon validation and early software development. You will also build test infrastructure for post-silicon bring-up and characterization.

What you will do

• Lead selection, procurement, and bring-up of FPGA prototyping platforms
• Adapt and implement complex ASIC RTL onto FPGA targets
• Integrate in-house designs with third-party and vendor IP
• Design, implement, and validate high-speed I/O with a focus on PCIe
• Build FPGA-based tester designs for silicon bring-up and device characterization
• Develop the software layer around the hardware including Python/C++ hardware abstraction
• Root-cause complex timing and functional issues in the lab using oscilloscopes and logic analyzers

Required qualifications

• Industry experience taking FPGA designs from RTL through timing closure to validated hardware
• Expert-level SystemVerilog and/or VHDL for synthesis
• Deep proficiency in Xilinx Vivado
• Hands-on experience implementing and debugging PCIe, AXI/AHB, SPI, UART, and JTAG
• Strong Python for automation, test, and build tooling
• Strong board-level bring-up and lab debugging skills on real hardware
• Startup mindset

Nice to have

• Verification frameworks like Cocotb or UVM
• Experience deploying ML models to FPGAs (hls4ml, FINN, or custom NN-to-RTL flows)
• Building real-time, sub-microsecond signal processing pipelines
• Mixed-signal ASIC exposure: digital front-ends, ADC/DAC interfaces, or analog compute
• SERDES tuning and signal integrity fundamentals
• CI/CD for hardware (GitLab CI, Docker-based build and test)

About the company

Normal is an applied AI company solving problems in AI and silicon. They build foundational hardware and software for the semiconductor industry and critical AI infrastructure.