Entry Level- FPGA Engineer (Onsite- Aberdeen, Maryland)

Fairwinds Technologies, L•Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD

5d•$75,000 - $85,000•Onsite

About The Position

Fairwinds Technologies is seeking curious, hands-on early-career engineers to design and develop hardware for radios, RF systems, embedded platforms, and test environments. In this role, you will support either the xG or Mixed Signal product development team, or technical-services contracts. You will collaborate with experienced engineers to design, simulate, implement, integrate, and verify programmable-logic solutions. Assignments will cover internal product development and customer-funded research, integration, test, demonstration, and field-support. This position is designed to build practical engineering depth and expose early-career engineers to the full lifecycle from requirements and architecture through hardware verification and measured system performance.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a closely related technical field, completed or expected before start date.
Coursework, laboratory, internship, capstone, research, or personal-project experience with FPGA development, digital logic, computer architecture, or embedded systems.
Foundational understanding of synchronous digital design, finite-state machines, registers, counters, memories, clocking, reset strategies, and timing concepts.
Academic or project experience using VHDL, Verilog, SystemVerilog, or another hardware description language.
Basic familiarity with simulation, synthesis, testbenches, and debugging digital hardware.
Ability to apply structured problem solving, learn unfamiliar devices and interfaces, communicate assumptions, and document results clearly.
Ability to collaborate in a multidisciplinary engineering environment and satisfy customer, site-access, export-control, and security requirements associated with assigned work.
Must be eligible to work in the US.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with an AMD/Xilinx, Intel/Altera, Microchip, Lattice, or comparable FPGA development board and toolchain.
Exposure to high-speed interfaces, data converters, DDR memory, Ethernet, PCIe, JESD204, SPI, I2C, UART, AXI, or similar buses and protocols.
Familiarity with fixed-point arithmetic, digital signal processing, software-defined radio, clock-domain crossing, timing closure, or hardware-in-the-loop testing.
Experience using Python, MATLAB, Simulink, cocotb, C or C++, Linux, Git, scripting, or automated build and verification workflows.
Coursework or project experience in wireless communications, RF systems, signal processing, 5G/LTE, non-terrestrial networks, radar, satellite communications, or test and measurement.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, simulate, and verify FPGA logic using VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog under the guidance of experienced engineers.
Develop reusable modules for data movement, control, timing, digital interfaces, buffering, signal processing, monitoring, and system integration.
Create testbenches, test vectors, assertions, and repeatable verification procedures to demonstrate functional and timing performance.
Use FPGA vendor development tools to synthesize, place and route, analyze timing, program devices, and debug designs in laboratory hardware.
Support device and board bring-up involving FPGAs, data converters, processors, memory, clocks, radios, RF front ends, and high-speed digital interfaces.
Collaborate with DSP engineers to translate algorithms and reference models into fixed-point, pipelined, resource-aware hardware implementations.
Collaborate with embedded software engineers on register maps, control interfaces, drivers, configuration, telemetry, and embedded Linux integration.
Use simulation, on-chip debug tools, laboratory instruments, and captured data to identify root causes and validate corrective actions.
Participate in code reviews, configuration management, issue tracking, design reviews, and continuous integration practices.
Prepare clear design descriptions, interface documentation, verification results, test reports, and configuration records for product and customer-funded activities.