Senior Principal FPGA Engineer

Location: Rochester, NY Department: Engineering FLSA Status: Exempt

Vanteon, a Performance Drone Works (PDW) Company, develops wireless, RF, and embedded technology for demanding applications. Our engineers work across hardware, software, firmware, and FPGA design to bring complex systems from concept through implementation and verification.

We are seeking a Senior Principal FPGA Engineer to provide technical leadership and hands-on development for customer programs and internal research and development. You will own complex FPGA architectures, solve challenging integration problems, and help strengthen the team's engineering practices. This role combines independent technical execution with collaboration, design review, and mentoring.

• Lead FPGA and SoC architecture, design, implementation, and verification for complex embedded systems.
• Translate system requirements into FPGA specifications, interface definitions, implementation plans, and verification criteria.
• Develop synthesizable VHDL and/or Verilog for digital logic, control functions, data interfaces, and real-time processing.
• Own synthesis, implementation, timing constraints, timing closure, and resource optimization.
• Develop simulation environments and test benches to verify functionality and identify issues before hardware integration.
• Lead FPGA configuration, hardware bring-up, debugging, and integration with embedded processors, firmware, and electronic subsystems.
• Collaborate with RF, hardware, DSP, and embedded software engineers to resolve system-level design challenges.
• Evaluate technical approaches and clearly communicate tradeoffs involving performance, complexity, schedule, and risk.
• Lead design reviews and maintain clear technical documentation, including architecture descriptions, verification results, and design rationale.
• Mentor engineers and improve reusable designs, development workflows, and verification practices.
• Provide technical estimates, feasibility assessments, and support for proposals and project planning.

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline.
• Extensive professional FPGA development experience, including technical ownership of complex designs through hardware verification and delivery.
• Advanced proficiency in VHDL and/or Verilog and a strong understanding of synthesizable design practices.
• Strong experience with FPGA development tools, including AMD/Xilinx Vivado and associated simulation and debugging tools.
• Demonstrated expertise in timing constraints, timing closure, clock-domain crossings, reset strategies, and FPGA resource optimization.
• Experience developing and verifying FPGA interfaces to processors, memory, peripherals, and other hardware.
• Experience with FPGA configuration, board bring-up, and diagnosing hardware and logic issues using laboratory equipment and embedded debugging tools.
• Ability to work independently, lead technical decisions, and coordinate effectively across engineering disciplines.
• Strong analytical, written communication, and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to meet the onsite ramp-up and controlled-data access requirements described below.

• Master's degree in a relevant engineering discipline.
• Experience with AMD/Xilinx Zynq, Ultra Scale+, or comparable FPGA and SoC platforms.
• Experience with Vivado/Vitis, Questa/Model Sim, or Intel Quartus tool chains.
• Experience implementing DSP algorithms, digital communications functions, or software-defined radio capabilities in FPGA hardware.
• Experience with high-throughput data paths and interfaces such as AXI, DMA, Ethernet, PCIe, and DDR memory.
• Familiarity with embedded C/C++, processor-to-FPGA integration,…