Silicon Validation Firmware Engineer

Meta•Sunnyvale, CA

13h

About The Position

Meta's Silicon Engineering team designs and delivers custom ASICs and SoCs that power products across Infrastructure, Reality Labs, and beyond. As a Silicon Validation Firmware Engineer at the senior level, you will develop and own firmware infrastructure used to validate custom silicon from pre-silicon emulation through post-silicon bring-up. You will work at the intersection of hardware and software, building low-level firmware, validation frameworks, and debug tooling that accelerate silicon readiness and ensure the reliability of Meta's custom chips at scale.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience
6+ years of experience developing validation firmware or embedded software for custom ASICs in C/C++
3+ years of experience with pre-silicon and post-silicon debug using tools such as Lauterbach, JTAG-based debuggers, or equivalent on physical silicon or FPGA platforms
Experience with EDA tools and scripting languages used to build tools and flows for complex emulation environments
Experience developing hardware abstraction layers, bootloaders, or low-level drivers for custom silicon platforms

Nice To Haves

Experience with SoC architecture including CPU cores, memory subsystems, cache hierarchies, and on-chip interconnects
Experience enabling validation across multiple pre-silicon environments including emulation and FPGA prototyping alongside physical silicon bring-up
Familiarity with hardware-software co-design workflows and contributing to architecture or microarchitecture decisions from a firmware validation perspective
Experience with machine learning or computer vision accelerator subsystems at the hardware-software integration level
Demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools to optimize/redesign workflows and drive measurable impact (e.g., efficiency gains, quality improvements)
Experience adhering to and implementing responsible, ethical AI practices (e.g., risk assessment, bias mitigation, quality and accuracy reviews)
Demonstrated ongoing AI skill development (e.g., prompt/context engineering, agent orchestration) and staying current with emerging AI technologies

Responsibilities

Develop and maintain low-level validation firmware in C/C++ targeting custom ASICs across emulation, FPGA, and silicon platforms
Lead pre-silicon and post-silicon validation efforts by authoring and executing firmware-driven test plans covering CPU subsystems, memory controllers, cache hierarchies, and high-speed interfaces
Bring up and debug complex SoC interfaces including PCIe, DDR, USB, and proprietary interconnects on emulation platforms and physical silicon
Build and maintain firmware infrastructure including bootloaders, hardware abstraction layers, and register-level drivers to support validation and characterization workflows
Collaborate with RTL design, architecture, and physical design teams to identify and root-cause silicon bugs, correlating pre-silicon simulation results with post-silicon behavior
Define and drive firmware validation methodology improvements that reduce bring-up cycle time and improve coverage across silicon generations
Develop automated test to enable continuous validation across emulation, FPGA prototyping, and silicon bring-up environments
Partner with hardware and software teams to support hardware-software co-design decisions and ensure firmware readiness at each silicon milestone
Contribute to silicon readiness reviews by documenting validation coverage, known issues, and risk assessments for key subsystems