Senior Electrical Engineer - FPGA Firmware

Power the future of Space at Star Catcher

Star Catcher is building the first energy grid in space to power the orbital economy.

Today’s spacecraft must generate all of their own power, which caps what they can do and how long they can operate. But what if they could “plug” into a grid, the way buildings do on Earth? Instead of cables and outlets, Star Catcher is building the technology to wirelessly beam energy to spacecraft’s existing solar panels when and where they need it.
Be an early member of a team building an entirely new energy infrastructure at scale to power the next frontier.

Star Catcher Industries, Inc., located in Jacksonville, Florida
, has an opportunity for a Senior Electrical Engineer - FPGA Firmware to support the development of space-to-space power beaming spacecraft and the Star Catcher Network, its orbital power grid.

• Lead FPGA gateware architecture for real-time control loops, including beam-control servo logic for Pointing, Acquisition & Tracking (PAT), and co-own interfaces with digital hardware, embedded software, and systems leads.
• Decompose and allocate system and board-level requirements to FPGA specifications, and architect solutions targeting FPGA/SoC platforms against those requirements.
• Review product specifications and generate module-level block diagrams, flow diagrams, and design concepts for FPGA subsystems.
• Drive timing closure, pipelining, and clock-domain crossing strategy for mission-critical designs.
• Set partitioning strategy between hard processor subsystems and reconfigurable fabric on SoC platforms.
• Lead full lifecycle development of VHDL or Verilog gateware, from architecture through simulation, integration, and test on the circuit card assembly.
• Map FPGA simulation work products to system-level requirements and capabilities, using complex block- and top-level simulations to verify performance ahead of hardware integration.
• Lead bench-level system integration of FPGA designs with hardware, firmware, and software.
• Refine and enforce consistent firmware development processes and version control practices across FPGA designs.
• Mentor firmware engineers and establish FPGA design/verification standards.
• Select and qualify FPGA/SoC platforms and associated tool chains for high-reliability, space-flight applications.
• Support qualification and production test efforts, including troubleshooting in the event of test failures.

• Education:
  
  Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Experience:
  
  10+ years of professional experience designing and verifying FPGA gateware in VHDL or Verilog.
• Experience with FPGA/SoC design tool chains, including synthesis, place-and-route, and timing closure.
• Demonstrated experience implementing real-time control loops in reconfigurable logic.
• Thorough understanding of version control best practices and tools for tracking changes to an FPGA baseline.

• Experience evaluating radiation-tolerant FPGA/SoC platforms, including Microchip RTG4/RT Polar Fire nonvolatile configuration and AMD XQR Kintex Ultra Scale/XQR Versal SRAM-based configuration. Understand configuration-upset mitigation and scrubbing where applicable, plus separate risks in user memory, logic, processors, and transceivers.
• Experience implementing DSP or signal-processing in FPGA fabric.
• Familiarity with spacecraft communications protocols (CCSDS) such as AOS, EPP, TM/TC, SPP.
• Experience with formal verification or advanced simulation methodologies, including transaction-based models for block- and top-level FPGA simulation.
• Experience with high-speed serial interfaces (e.g., PCIe, Space Wire, Ethernet), control interfaces (e.g., I2C,…