Staff AI Product Engineer, FW/SW

PsiQuantum•Milpitas, CA

About The Position

This is a senior individual contributor role at the intersection of silicon photonics, embedded systems, electronics, controls, and system software. The engineer translates photonic device and system requirements into robust control algorithms, firmware, APIs, diagnostics, and system-level software. The role involves developing firmware and software for complex embedded hardware, applying closed-loop control and real-time system principles, and working directly with hardware during bring-up, characterization, debugging, and productization.

Requirements

BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Controls Engineering, Physics, or a related technical discipline.
Significant professional experience developing firmware and software for complex embedded systems.
Strong C/C++ programming experience for embedded systems.
Experience with Python or similar languages for automation, system test, data analysis, and hardware control.
Strong understanding of embedded processors, microcontrollers, memory architectures, interrupts, timing, concurrency, and hardware interfaces.
Experience with RTOS and/or embedded Linux environments.
Demonstrated experience developing software that directly controls physical hardware.
Strong understanding of feedback and closed-loop control systems.
Experience implementing calibration, compensation, monitoring, and control algorithms.
Experience with embedded communication protocols such as SPI, I²C, UART, GPIO, Ethernet, or similar interfaces.
Strong system-level debugging skills across hardware and software boundaries.
Experience developing software for hardware bring-up, characterization, and automated test.
Ability to read schematics, understand hardware architecture, and collaborate effectively with electrical and hardware engineers.
Ability to translate loosely defined system requirements into a robust firmware/software architecture and implementation.

Responsibilities

Architect, develop, and maintain embedded firmware for control and management of silicon photonics products.
Develop firmware that interfaces with photonic devices, ASICs/FPGAs, DACs, ADCs, temperature sensors, power-management devices, and other board-level electronics.
Implement closed-loop control algorithms for optical operating points, temperature, power, bias, alignment, switching state, and other device-specific control variables.
Account for system dynamics, stability, convergence, calibration, tolerances, noise, drift, and failure modes when designing control loops.
Develop real-time and event-driven firmware for complex embedded systems.
Develop device initialization, calibration, configuration, monitoring, fault management, and recovery mechanisms.
Define and implement state machines for system startup, operation, fault handling, recovery, and shutdown.
Work with system architects to define the product's overall software and firmware control architecture.
Support remote firmware and software updates, configuration management, versioning, and system recovery.
Design firmware and software with reliability, testability, manufacturability, and field serviceability in mind.
Develop automated calibration and test capabilities that can move from engineering environments into manufacturing.
Define manufacturing configuration, calibration data, device parameters, and nonvolatile storage requirements.
Support production test, system qualification, reliability testing, and failure analysis.
Develop diagnostics that help manufacturing and field teams quickly isolate failures.