FPGA Hardware Acceleration Researcher

FPGA Hardware Acceleration Researcher

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced FPGA Hardware Acceleration Engineer to design, implement, and deploy high-performance compute pipelines on modern heterogeneous FPGA platforms, including AMD Versal AI Edge.

You will be responsible for the end-to-end hardware acceleration pipeline, from RTL/HLS development and simulation through synthesis, timing closure, and physical board bring-up. You will work closely with AI researchers and embedded software engineers to translate algorithms into efficient, low-latency, and deterministic hardware implementations.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement custom FPGA compute engines and high-throughput streaming data paths using Verilog/SystemVerilog or C/C++ HLS.
• Develop and optimize memory and data-transfer interfaces, including AXI4, AXI-Stream, DMA, DDR4/LPDDR, and related architectures.
• Perform logic synthesis, place-and-route, timing analysis, and timing closure using AMD Vivado, Vitis, and Vitis AI.
• Bring up and validate FPGA designs on physical evaluation boards and hardware-in-the-loop test environments.
• Debug hardware issues using logic analyzers and on-chip debugging tools.
• Integrate FPGA acceleration kernels with ARM-based host processors and embedded software stacks.
• Optimize hardware architectures for throughput, latency, resource utilization, memory bandwidth, and deterministic execution.
• Collaborate with AI/ML researchers and software engineers to map computational workloads onto FPGA-based acceleration platforms.

Requirements

• Master’s degree or above in Electrical/Electronic Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
• Hands-on experience taking FPGA designs through the complete development cycle, including RTL/HLS, simulation, synthesis, implementation, and on-board validation.
• Strong programming and hardware design skills in Verilog/SystemVerilog, VHDL, or C/C++ HLS.
• Practical experience with AMD Vivado/Vitis or equivalent FPGA development tools.
• Solid understanding of FPGA architecture, pipelining, parallel processing, memory hierarchy, and hardware optimization.
• Strong knowledge of AXI4 / AXI-Stream and high-performance data movement architectures.
• Experience with DMA, PCIe, DDR4/LPDDR, or other high-speed memory and I/O interfaces.
• Experience with hardware debugging, board bring-up, and timing closure.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AMD Versal, Versal AI Edge, Zynq UltraScale+, or other heterogeneous FPGA platforms.
• Experience accelerating AI/ML, computer vision, signal processing, or other compute-intensive workloads on FPGA.
• Familiarity with Vitis AI, FPGA-based AI acceleration, or heterogeneous CPU/FPGA architectures.
• Experience integrating FPGA accelerators with ARM processors or embedded Linux systems.
• Strong understanding of performance optimization and hardware/software co-design.