FPGA Design Engineer III

Firefly Aerospace is a space and defense technology company on a mission to reliably and repeatedly launch, land, and operate space systems from Earth to the Moon and beyond.

As the partner of choice for critical space missions, Firefly is the first commercial company to launch a satellite to orbit with 24-hour notice and the first company to achieve a successful Moon landing.

Headquartered in north Austin, Texas, Firefly is looking for passionate, hardworking innovators to join our team and help fuel our successful trajectory into space.

Firefly is seeking an experienced FPGA RTL Design Engineer with 3+ years of direct professional Verilog hardware design experience.

This role focuses on designing, implementing, verifying, and optimizing custom digital logic in the FPGA fabric of Microchip PolarFire SoCs for high-reliability embedded systems.

Key aspects of the work include RTL development, synthesis, timing closure, testbench creation, and integration of custom IP blocks with the integrated RISC-V processor subsystem.

This is a hardware design role — candidates should have meaningful hands-on experience taking designs from RTL through implementation on FPGA hardware.

You will work in a fast-paced, collaborative environment to deliver robust firmware for mission-critical space applications in industries such as aerospace, defense, and industrial automation.

• Design, develop, and verify FPGA logic using VHDL/Verilog/SystemVerilog for Microchip PolarFire SoCs, including programmable logic, DSP blocks, and high-speed interfaces (e.g., PCIe, Ethernet, SERDES).
• Create and optimize IP cores and custom peripherals/accelerators tailored to PolarFire's architecture.
• Integrate FPGA firmware with embedded processors (e.g., RISC-V cores) and collaborate with software teams to support Board Support Packages (BSPs) and Linux kernel drivers.
• Build RTL verification environments with testbenches using UVM methodologies for design correctness and coverage.