Firmware Engineer

Neurophos • Austin, TX

9d • Onsite

About The Position

We are seeking a talented Firmware Engineer to join our engineering team. This role is focused on low-level firmware development for our novel LLM accelerator architecture. You will develop code for the firmware layer that directly controls our custom hybrid optical-electronic compute hardware, ensuring reliable operation and optimal performance.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field
• 3–5 years of professional experience in firmware engineering, embedded systems, or low-level systems programming
• High proficiency in embedded C++ (essential)
• Python for tooling and automation
• Experience with embedded systems programming and hardware interfaces
• Familiarity with computer architecture, memory hierarchies, and parallel computing concepts
• Experience with hardware communication protocols and register-level programming

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field
• Experience with lower speed peripheral busses (I2C/SPI/UART/CAN/LIN)
• Some experience with PCIe interfaces
• Some experience with Ethernet interfaces
• Experience with embedded processor architectures (ARM, RISC-V, or similar) and associated toolchains (strongly preferred)
• Experience with early firmware development on virtual platforms and/or fast C simulators (preferred)
• Hands-on experience with cross-compiler toolchains (preferred)
• Experience with Docker containers for development and delivery (preferred)
• Experience debugging parallel and asynchronous programs (strongly preferred)
• Experience with bare metal programming and RTOS (FreeRTOS, Zephyr, or similar) (preferred)
• Experience with structured, human-supervised AI/agentic coding workflows (preferred)
• Experience with multi-node embedded systems, including inter-node communication and coordination (strongly preferred)
• Experience with multi-processor systems, including IPC and shared memory coordination (preferred)
• Experience designing adaptive and retargetable firmware architectures (preferred)
• Experience with over-the-air update systems for embedded devices (preferred)
• Ability to read and understand RTL code for debugging and hardware-software co-design
• Experience with AI/ML accelerators (GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs) and their programming models
• Experience with high-performance computing and low-latency system design
• Experience with thermal management and power optimization in embedded systems
• Familiarity with Large Language Model architectures and their computational requirements (preferred)
• Some familiarity or understand of AMBA, AXI, PCIe, on processors and ROCv1/2, Infiniband over networks
• Experience with I2C, SPI, UART, or low-speed serial protocols
• Ethernet familiarity
• Experience with ARM Cortex-M/A, RISC-V, or similar; associated toolchains and debugging
• Experience with bare metal programming, FreeRTOS, Zephyr, or similar RTOS
• Verilog/SystemVerilog (reading comprehension), ModelSim, Questasim, or similar simulation tools (nice to have)
• Register-level programming, memory-mapped I/O
• Polling, Interrupt and DMA based hardware interactions
• Inter-node communication, message passing, distributed state management (nice to have)
• Unit testing frameworks, hardware-in-the-loop testing, integration testing
• Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar systems
• CMake, Git, Docker
• GDB, JTAG debuggers, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, hardware protocol analyzers
• Posix/Linux (user-space tooling), embedded RTOS internals
• Assembly for low-level optimization
• JTAG debuggers, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, protocol analyzers
• Simulators/Emulators for hardware-software co-verification
• Hardware-in-the-loop testing, automated regression suites, CI pipelines

Responsibilities

• Contributing to low-level firmware to orchestrate execution of LLM workloads across hardware accelerator components
• Contributing to system and board management of such a system
• Create debugging and profiling tools for firmware and hardware interaction
• Collaborate with hardware engineers to define software-hardware interfaces
• Optimize end-to-end performance from application layer to hardware execution
• Develop comprehensive testing and validation frameworks
• Create documentation and specifications for firmware interfaces
• Support customer integration and provide technical guidance

Benefits

• 100% coverage of base health plan premiums for you and your dependents, plus HSA contributions
• Unlimited PTO
• 401(k) matching
• Stock option opportunities
• Full suite of voluntary benefits, including Dental, Vision, Life, Hospital, Critical Illness, and Accident insurance
• Personalized Benefits

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level