Job Description
FPGA Engineer, Safety-Critical Embedded Systems (Nuclear Microreactors) Industry: Advanced Energy, Nuclear Systems, Factory-Built Microreactors Work Location: Onsite, El Segundo, California Employment Type: Full-time, exempt salaried About The Opportunity A fast-moving energy startup is building next-generation, portable nuclear microreactors designed for real-world deployment. The mission is straightforward and ambitious: deliver reliable, high-density power in places where diesel generators are the default and where energy resilience is non-negotiable. The first product is a transportable microreactor in the 1 MW class, engineered to operate for years without refueling. These systems are intended for high-importance environments such as hospitals, data centers, remote industrial sites, and defense applications. This is not theoretical work. The team is actively preparing for first-of-a-kind testing at a major U.S. national laboratory, with a roadmap toward commercial delivery. If you want to help build one of the first new commercial reactor designs in decades, this role is a front-row seat. The Role As an FPGA Engineer on the Embedded Systems team, you will design and deliver FPGA logic that lives inside the reactor’s instrumentation and control stack. Your work will directly support safety-critical monitoring, sensor and actuator processing, and robust communication pathways. You will collaborate daily with hardware, embedded software, controls, and test engineers to produce cohesive, verifiable designs that meet the realities of operating and supervising a fission system. This is a hands-on engineering role where you will own meaningful architecture, write production-grade RTL, and validate it end to end. What You Will Build FPGA-based sensor acquisition and processing pipelines that translate real-world signals into deterministic, safety-grade data. Logic for actuator interfacing and timing-sensitive control signals, built for reliability and traceability. Communication and data-handling logic that integrates cleanly with embedded software and system-level controls. Verification infrastructure and automated tests to ensure correctness across edge cases and failure scenarios. Key Responsibilities Own FPGA and sensor-processing designs from early concept through integration and system validation. Develop and maintain RTL in VHDL for production safety-critical applications. Bring designs onto FPGA and FPGA/SoC targets, including integration with firmware and board-level hardware. Drive timing closure across multi-clock domains and complex interfaces. Create automated verification tests and contribute to robust verification strategy. Partner closely with embedded software engineers to deliver complete, testable features. Collaborate across hardware, controls, mechanical, and test teams to ensure the system works as a whole. Document designs clearly so they are maintainable, auditable, and scalable as the platform evolves. Required Qualifications Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a closely related discipline. 5+ years of professional FPGA development experience in a real-world product environment. Strong proficiency in VHDL and experience building synthesizable, production RTL. Demonstrated experience resolving timing closure issues and optimizing performance. Comfort working with multi-clock systems, clock-domain crossing concerns, and deterministic design requirements. Working knowledge of verification methodologies and an engineering mindset that prioritizes testability. Ability to work effectively in a cross-functional environment with multiple engineering disciplines. Preferred Qualifications Experience with embedded C and C++ in systems that interface with FPGA logic. Familiarity with Microchip PolarFire SoC or similar FPGA/SoC platforms. Comfort working in Linux development environments, including bash scripting. Experience using Docker to standardize builds, tooling, or CI workflows. Strong documentation habits, including design notes, interface specs, and verification plans. Prior exposure to safety-critical, regulated, or high-assurance engineering environments. What Makes This Role Different You are building for the real world. This is hardware that will be tested, validated, and deployed, not a prototype that lives on a lab bench. The engineering bar is high. Safety-critical instrumentation and control work demands rigor, clarity, and discipline. You will have true ownership. You will take design