Senior Staff Signal Processing Engineer

Aurora•Mountain View, CA

10d•$191,000 - $307,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Aurora is seeking a Senior Staff Signal Processing Engineer to join their team and contribute to building the next generation of advanced lidar. This role requires a subject matter expert to lead the development, testing, and implementation of DSP algorithms, pipelines, and development tools from simulation through to custom silicon. The position offers the opportunity to lead architectural strategy through close collaboration with photonics, R&D, and electrical engineering teams.

Requirements

BSc, MSc or Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or a related quantitative field, paired with 10+ years of relevant industry experience in advanced DSP design.
Expert-level mastery of foundational and advanced signal processing mathematics (e.g., spectral estimation, filtering, phase recovery, modulation/demodulation, detection theory and noise mitigation).
Proven track record applying advanced DSP principles within signal-dense domains such as modern radar systems, optical or RF telecommunications, or computational physics.
Demonstrated experience mapping and optimizing high-throughput algorithms onto hardware architectures with tight latency, bandwidth, and compute constraints (FPGAs, SoC/SIMD vector engines, and/or ASICs).
Expert proficiency in Python, C/C++, or MATLAB for modeling, simulation, algorithmic verification, and data analysis.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with high-speed optical/RF front-ends, ADCs/DACs, and the associated digital impairment compensation techniques.
Hands on experience taking complex DSP algorithms from FPGA/SIMD prototyping platforms to custom silicon (ASIC microarchitecture specification, fixed-point optimization, and silicon validation).
Experience building first-principles models of physical wave propagation, optical coherent detection, RF/optical channel dynamics, or sensor front-end hardware non-idealities.
Background writing low-level, compute-optimized code for SIMD architectures, vector engines, or modern DSP hardware accelerators.

Responsibilities

Architect Core DSP Pipelines: Lead the algorithmic strategy, modeling, and architectural implementation of end-to-end signal processing pipelines for next-generation coherent lidar systems.
Optimize for Hardware Execution: Translate high-level mathematical models into compute-optimized architectures, targeting modern embedded platforms (FPGAs/SIMD) and guiding the hardware specification for future custom silicon (ASIC).
Bridge Physics and Hardware: Partner closely with photonics, optical R&D, and electrical engineering teams to map physical optical properties and system noise dynamics into practical digital processing algorithms and system requirements.
Build Simulation & Tooling Environments: Develop scalable, first-principles simulation frameworks and prototyping tools to validate algorithms prior to silicon bring-up and evaluate key trade-offs between performance, power, and area.
Verification and Bring-Up: Drive the testing, verification, and performance tuning of DSP IP across simulation, hardware emulation targets, initial ASIC silicon bring-up, and real-world system testing.