FPGA Verification & Control Systems Engineer

Overview

At Zero Point Motion, the FPGA is not glue logic. It is a core part of the sensing system. This role exists to design, verify, and operate real-time digital systems that directly interact with physical reality: MEMS motion, photonic signals, noise, timing, and control loops. If you think of FPGA work as abstract RTL design, this role is not for you.

If you think of digital systems as applied mathematics implemented in silicon, it might be.

The Role

At Zero Point Motion, the FPGA is not glue logic. It is a core part of the sensing system. This role exists to design, verify, and operate real-time digital systems that directly interact with physical reality: MEMS motion, photonic signals, noise, timing, and control loops. If you think of FPGA work as abstract RTL design, this role is not for you.

If you think of digital systems as applied mathematics implemented in silicon, it might be.

The Role

As an FPGA / Digital Systems Engineer, you own real-time digital control and signal processing that directly interfaces with MEMS and photonic hardware. Your work directly determines lock stability, noise floors, measurement fidelity, and whether demos succeed or fail. This is a hands-on role. Verification quality, timing discipline, and physical intuition matter more than clever architectures. If you write the code, you own proving that it is correct.

The role sits close to R&D: the FPGA is part of discovering system truth, not just implementing a frozen design.

Digital control & signal processing

• Design, implement, and verify FPGA systems interfacing with photonic sensors, MEMS devices, and high-speed ADCs/DACs

• Implement and stabilise real-time systems such as:

  • PLLs

  • AGC

  • nested feedback loops

  • quadrature demodulation

  • force-to-rebalance control

• Reason explicitly about timing, latency, jitter, phase noise, quantisation, and numerical stability

Digital ↔ physical reasoning

• Translate mathematical models and control theory into discrete-time digital implementations

• Understand how RTL decisions affect mechanical motion, optical phase, thermal drift, and noise coupling

• Treat the FPGA as part of the physical system, not an isolated digital block

Hardware interfaces & IO

• Implement and debug SPI, I2C, UART, GPIO, and high-speed ADC/DAC interfaces

• Design safe clock-domain crossings intentionally

• Build reliable data logging and streaming under real-time constraints

Verification & observability (non-negotiable)

• Build proper verification environments:

  • structured test benches

  • assertions tied to in variants

  • deterministic stimuli

  • quantitative pass/fail metrics

• Verification must be automated, repeatable, and explainable

• Eyeballing oscilloscope traces is not verification

• Design for observability with internal instrumentation and clear failure modes

Tooling, lab work & data

• Write clean, disciplined RTL (Verilog / System Verilog)

• Use Python as a first-class tool for test automation, bring-up, verification support, and data analysis

• Be fluent with lab instrumentation and understand their limitations, not just their outputs

You must have:

• Strong fundamentals in digital design and real-time systems

• Solid grounding in control theory or signal processing

• Hands-on experience bringing up FPGA designs on real hardware

• Experience implementing and verifying control loops, PLLs, or equivalent feedback systems

• Comfort working at the boundary between digital logic, analog signals, and physical systems

• High personal standards around correctness, verification, and documentation

• Experience with ASIC flows is a plus, not a requirement

This role is not for:

• MATLAB-first engineers

• simulation-only designers

• FPGA developers who avoid lab work

• people who “verify” by visual inspection

• engineers uncomfortable with noise, timing, or pressure

This is not:

• a pure web, SaaS, or framework-driven role

• a narrowly scoped backend position

• a job for people who only write one-off scripts and move on

• a place for over-abstracted code no one can debug

• a role for people who wait for perfect specifications

• You are motivated by the underlying mathematics, not just by making something work

• You do not ship what you cannot…