Principal Engineer, ASIC Verification & Validation Engineering

Role Overview

The Platform Engineering organization is looking for a self-driven, hands-on engineer who can bridge the communication and skillset divide between firmware, silicon design, and hardware validation. Your primary responsibility will be supporting our advanced prototyping and emulation platforms, with a specific focus on end users. 

The ideal candidate has a broad, systems-level knowledge base, with deep technical expertise in platform bring-up, hardware/software co-verification, and high-density FPGA deployments.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Lead Project Bring-Up & Diagnostics: Partner with firmware and hardware teams during the critical early phases of project bring-up. Own the initial setup, environment configuration, and stabilization of emulation and prototyping platforms.
• Triage & Debug: Act as the first line of defense for complex system-level failures during bring-up. Rapidly isolate root causes across the hardware, FPGA/emulator configuration, and early boot-code boundaries.
• Partner with Customers: Work directly with product firmware engineers to break down execution barriers, unblock their development pipelines, and abstract away hardware complexities.
• Infrastructure Automation: Develop automation, monitoring scripts, and health-check reporting to maximize the reliability, utilization, and throughput of the emulation and prototyping farm.
• Knowledge Sharing: Document creative workarounds, capture debug methodologies, and build standardized playbooks for platform setup and troubleshooting.

Desired Skills & Experience

• FPGA Prototyping & Support: Proven experience supporting large-scale FPGA prototyping platforms (e.g., Synopsys HAPS, custom multi-FPGA boards). Understanding of FPGA synthesis, place-and-route constraints, and clocking strategies is highly valued.
• System-Level Debugging: Mastery of debugging tools and protocols (e.g., JTAG, protocol analyzers, logic analyzers, in-circuit emulators) to trace signals and state machines during early platform bring-up.
• Emulation Platforms: Familiarity with hardware emulation architectures (e.g., Cadence Palladium, Synopsys ZeBu) and how to map design code into an emulation environment.
• Hardware/Firmware Intersection: Solid understanding of the firmware development lifecycle and how it intersects with ASIC development, hardware description languages (Verilog/SystemVerilog), and FPGA design.
• Python Expertise: Advanced Python scripting skills to develop internal tools, parsing utilities for debug logs, and automated regression testing frameworks.
• Rudimentary Firmware Skills: Ability to write and debug low-level diagnostic code or bare-metal software to validate platform functionality, without needing to own the production product firmware.
• Systems Administration: Functional understanding of networking, UNIX/Linux, and Windows administration. Because the team manages a high volume of specialized prototyping seats, the ability to troubleshoot local environment, licensing, and OS-level issues is critical.
• Data Manipulation: Expertise in processing and analyzing usage metrics to optimize resource allocation across a global infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Education: BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science.
• Experience: 8–15 years of experience working in or around pre-silicon development, hardware verification, or platform bring-up.

Sandisk thrives on the power and potential of diversity. As a global company, we believe the most effective way to embrace the diversity of our customers and communities is to mirror it from within. We believe the fusion of various perspectives results in the best outcomes for our employees, our company, our customers, and the world around us. We are committed to an inclusive environment where every individual can thrive through a sense of belonging, respect and contribution.

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