Senior Software Engineer

As a Science Instrument FPGA Engineer at Spire, you will be an integral part of a dynamic team that designs, develops, tests, and operates RF (radio-frequency) science instruments for a constellation of Earth-observation nanosatellites. Our particular focus is on the GPS (Global Positioning System) and GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signals for measuring atmospheric and ionospheric states, as well as the condition of the land and ocean surfaces of the Earth.

You will be involved in various phases of instrument development in the areas of the FPGA (field-programmable gate array) firmware, affiliated software, and testing and deployment of them, to improve the capabilities of the existing payloads as well as newly designed ones in the roadmap. The major topics the present position involves include, but are not limited to, data acquisition of RF signals, DSP (digital signal processing) of RF signals, hardware acceleration of computationally intensive tasks such as GPS/GNSS signal processing, and control of peripheral devices.

Your deliverables will fly on satellites and start gathering valuable Earth observation data in a matter of months, not years, after you join Spire. You will see the data generated by the instrument with your FPGA impacting many people through improved numerical weather forecasts, deepening understanding of the changing climate, and providing insights into various types of natural phenomena and human activities taking place on ground and in space.

Responsibilities of your role:

• To design, implement in VHDL and C++ (Vivado HLS), and test FPGA firmware for existing and new RF science instruments. Typical functionalities include GNSS signal processing, interfacing with the RF front-end circuitry, transferring real-time data streams between FPGA and CPU, and communicating with the software.
• To develop and test software, in C++, that integrates the FPGA functionality to the software-defined radio application.
• To gather requirements for various signal-processing and data-manipulation algorithms, implement them, trade off implementation details under constraints, and maximize their performance.
• To gather various types of data from on-ground tests and on-orbit operation of the instrument, analyze them to verify their implementation, and validate their performance.
• To effectively and efficiently collaborate with team members in remote offices both in real time and asynchronously, to discuss development plans, run tests, and operate instruments in space.
• To author design documents and test reports.

Minimum Qualifications:

• MSc or Ph.D. degree in a STEM-related field.
• 5 or more years of FPGA development experience that involves real-time data processing (RF, sound, video, LIDAR, communication, etc), sensor data acquisition.
• Proficiency in VHDL for FPGA development.
• Hands on development and test experience with Xilinx Zynq or Zynq UltraScale+ SoC.
• Design and development experience of the FPGA-software interface for control and data transfer in C or C++ (register access, IRQ, DMA, device tree, cache coherency).
• Basic knowledge of C++.
• Familiarity with Linux and Git.

Candidates must also meet 3 or more of the following:

• Proficiency in Vivado HLS (C++).
• Experience in large-scale software development in C++.
• Proficiency in Python for data analysis and visualization, and general automation.
• Experience with software-defined radio systems such as LimeSDR and HackRF One.
• Development experience involving custom embedded GNSS receiver systems using FPGA technology.
• Strong background in scientific applications of GPS/GNSS signals, in particular for GNSS Reflectometry and GNSS Radio Occultation.
• Fluency in general radio frequency signal processing techniques, including knowledge of down conversion, filters, sampling, and FFT processing.