Wireless PHY Systems Engineer — Pre-Silicon Emulation

Apple

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About The Position

Apple is seeking a Wireless PHY Systems Engineer to support pre-silicon verification for wireless SoCs, centered on the Palladium emulation platform. The role de-risks silicon ahead of tape-out by owning the emulation environment that lets teams exercise and verify new designs early. The engineer will bring up each newly released emulation build and design, maintain, and evolve the framework and infrastructure—including register maps, initialization and boot sequences, clock and reset setup, and system-level configuration—that brings the emulated SoC into operation and enables broader design verification.

Working across digital design, firmware, and validation, the engineer will contribute to pre-silicon emulation and lab bring-up of Bluetooth and UWB silicon, and maintain the infrastructure across successive silicon generations. The role calls for an understanding of the wireless signal chain from RF and PHY through MAC and firmware. Prior Palladium experience is not required; Apple will help the successful candidate ramp up on the platform.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree with 10 years of relevant experience.
• Solid foundation in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and wireless communications, with working knowledge of PHY and MAC layer concepts.
• Hands-on software programming skills for system modeling, simulation, and test, with proficiency in MATLAB and C/C++.
• Familiarity with analog/RF impairments common in wireless systems, such as phase noise, IQ imbalance, and nonlinearity.
• Experience with or knowledge of wireless standards such as Bluetooth, Ultra-Wideband (UWB), or other wireless protocols.
• Experience collecting, processing, and visualizing large-scale simulation and test datasets, including performance metrics such as measurement accuracy, latency, and throughput.
• Strong written and oral communication skills and the ability to work effectively across cross-functional teams.

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree with 10 years of relevant experience.
• Hands-on experience in wireless chip or modem development and a strong systems-level understanding of cross-layer dependencies between RF, PHY, MAC, and firmware.
• Hands-on experience in Bluetooth and UWB systems design and validation.
• Digital design fundamentals and a solid understanding of SoC architecture and system-level hardware/software interaction.
• Hands-on RTL experience (Verilog/VHDL) and experience with register map and programming-model definition.
• Experience with fixed-point design, RTL vector generation, and/or High-Level Synthesis (HLS).
• Experience with pre-silicon emulation (e.g., Palladium) or FPGA prototyping, including build bring-up, debugging, and performance characterization.
• Experience developing validation frameworks and infrastructure, including initialization sequences, clock and reset setup, and system-level configuration.
• Experience in lab FPGA/silicon bring-up, PHY/RF/MAC testing, and use of RF lab equipment.
• Proficiency with Python for test automation and data analysis, and experience with simulation automation, regression frameworks, or CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience collaborating with firmware and FPGA/emulation engineers to bring up, integrate, and debug hardware platforms and ensure correct hardware/software interaction.

Responsibilities

• Bring up each newly released emulation build.
• Design, own, and evolve the pre-silicon emulation framework and infrastructure across successive silicon generations.
• Develop and maintain register maps, initialization and boot sequences, clock and reset setup, and system-level configuration.
• Bring the emulated SoC into an operational state and enable the wider team to run design verification.
• Contribute to pre-silicon emulation and lab bring-up of Bluetooth and UWB silicon.
• Collaborate across digital design, firmware, validation, and other functional areas.

What This Job Offers

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