Principal FPGA Engineer

Work with cutting edgeAItechnology, making the world a safer and more secure place. DroneShield (ASX:DRO) offers an opportunity to solve some of world’s most challenging technical problems in therapidly growing counterdrone sector.Ourcustomersaremilitaries, government agencies, airports, critical infrastructure, law enforcement and many others.

With one of the largest listed defence company market capitalisations in Australia, part of the ASX200 index,and having raised approximately $250m in 2024 alone, DroneShield is undergoing hypergrowth stage, fuelled by rapidly increasing use of drones for nefarious applications, from battlefield, to terrorism, to contraband delivery and commercial espionage.

This role will be based within a new DroneShield facility based in the Adelaide CBD. Droneshield has approximately 390 staff based within its Sydney headquarters and is scheduled to grow to 500 staff in Australia by end of 2026. Overseas on the ground presence includes Virginia (USA), Denmark, Germany and Dubai, as well as distributors in over 70 countries globally.

About the role

DroneShield is seeking a Principal FPGA Engineer with relevant experience to join the team in Adelaide, South Australia. The position will report to the Embedded Hardware Manager within the Sensors and Effectors Team.

The Sensors and Effectors team at Droneshield is focused on providing fully operational and qualified modular devices to enable new product development of high-end RF based sensors and effectors. These modules are re-used across various product configurations including man-portable, vehicle mounted and fixed site. Key technical challenges for the electronics aspect of these modules include the design of complex wide-band RF circuitry, high speed digital interface and high-power radio frequency output. DroneShield designs and builds the full signal chain from signal generation to antenna.

The expectations of this role will be focussed on the architecture of the system and detailed design, working with other teams to ensure the next generation product remain class leading. This will include inputs to the next generation electronics architecture.

Responsibilities, Duties and Expectations

- The work is predominantly technical and requires an understanding of radio frequency (RF) concepts, FPGA and ARM processor development, digital signal processing, related hardware technology, test equipment and/or communication systems
- Research, scoping, design, development, and implementation of embedded software systems to support real-time wide frequency spectrum RF digital data signal processing
- Proprietary and open standard transmission protocol identification and data recovery
- Optimise the core of DroneShield’s technology for recognition, accuracy, performance, stability, and maintenance

Qualifications, Experience and Skills

- BS/BE degree in Electronic Engineering, similar technical field of study or equivalent practical experience.
- 10+ years of qualified experience working within an established team.
- Strong experience with programming, debugging, and verifying Verilog, VHDL or SystemVerilog.
- Strong Experience using and designing automated Verification and Validation frameworks.
- Experience with synthesis and complex timing closure on resource constrained FPGAs.
- Experience in high-speed digital design and building customized IP cores.
- FPGA development experience using FPGA software tools such as Vivado (preferable), Quartus, Vitis etc.
- Experience with designing and implementing high-throughput, low-latency and fully pipelined FPGA architectures.
- Experience writing C/C++ firmware for FPGA modules along with familiarity with scripting languages (Python Preferable).
- Experience working in a Linux environment.
- Experience working with PCB schematics, board bring-ups and debugging hardware is highly desirable.
- Strong background and experience in Digital Signal Processing is highly desirable.
- A general RF background and knowledge of RF transmission protocols and general principals is desirable.
- Understanding or working knowledge of Machine Learning (ML) concepts within the scope of FPGA implementation would be ideal.

Note for recruitment agencies: We do not accept unsolicited candidates from external recruiters unless specifically instructed.

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