Principal Silicon Systems Engineer Verified today

About the role

Blue Origin is developing TeraWave, a satellite communications network delivering symmetrical data speeds up to 6 Tbps globally. You will join the Silicon Development team as Principal Silicon Systems Engineer, providing senior technical leadership at the intersection of communications DSP, embedded software, custom processors, hardware accelerators, and ASIC implementation.

This is a hands-on principal-level role requiring broad experience across the HW/SW boundary. You will lead technical planning across DSP and embedded software teams, drive HW/SW partitioning and performance tradeoffs, define implementation interfaces, and guide development from modeling and pre-silicon verification through silicon integration and bring-up.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the technical implementation plan across DSP, low-level software/firmware, programmable processors, and hardware accelerators for custom communications silicon.
• Work with Systems, Algorithm, and ASIC teams to determine appropriate partitioning of communications and DSP functions between software-programmable processing and dedicated hardware acceleration based on performance, latency, power, memory, and implementation complexity.
• Translate system and algorithm requirements into clear technical workstreams, interfaces, dependencies, and implementation plans for DSP and embedded software teams.
• Guide the implementation and integration of DSP workloads across embedded CPUs, custom processing elements, vector/DSP execution resources, and dedicated hardware accelerators.
• Develop and use system and performance models to analyze processing load, throughput, latency, memory bandwidth, data movement, and HW/SW architecture tradeoffs.
• Work with communications and algorithm teams to ensure modem and DSP algorithms map efficiently into real-time silicon implementations.
• Provide technical guidance for low-level software and firmware interacting directly with custom silicon, processors, accelerators, memory, peripherals, and hardware control interfaces.
• Define and review interfaces between embedded software, processors, accelerators, and RTL blocks, ensuring clear ownership and robust integration.
• Drive early DSP and software integration using simulation, FPGA prototypes, emulation environments, and other pre-silicon platforms.
• Work closely with RTL and DV teams to develop system-level verification approaches and debug complex problems spanning software, processor architecture, accelerators, interconnects, and RTL.
• Provide technical leadership during silicon bring-up and integration, including performance correlation and debugging across software and hardware boundaries.
• Mentor engineers across DSP and embedded software, conduct technical reviews, guide difficult implementation decisions, and raise the technical bar across the team.

Basic qualifications

• BS or MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a closely related field.
• 12+ years of hands-on experience in ASIC/SoC, embedded systems, communications silicon, DSP, or related semiconductor development.
• Deep experience working across hardware and software boundaries in complex SoCs.
• Strong understanding of processors, hardware accelerators, memory systems, interconnects, peripherals, and embedded software.
• Strong understanding of DSP implementation and the mapping of signal-processing algorithms onto programmable processors and hardware accelerators.
• Experience modeling and analyzing processor performance, throughput, latency, memory bandwidth, and system bottlenecks.
• Strong understanding of low-level software/firmware interacting directly with custom silicon.
• Experience working with RTL, verification, and ASIC implementation teams.
• Experience with simulation, FPGA prototyping, emulation, or other pre-silicon development environments.
• Demonstrated ability to debug complex issues crossing processor, software, RTL, accelerator, and system boundaries.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical work across multiple engineering disciplines and mentor senior engineers.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience developing cellular, wireless, satellite, or other communications SoCs.
• Experience with modem/L1 execution environments and real-time communications processing.
• Experience designing or working with custom DSP/CPU architectures.
• Experience with MIMO, beamforming, or other communications hardware accelerators.
• Experience with RTL/SystemVerilog and silicon verification.
• Experience with SoC interconnect and data-movement architectures.
• Experience with FPGA-based silicon prototyping and verification.
• Experience with processor and accelerator performance modeling.
• Experience with C/C++ and low-level embedded software.
• Experience taking complex SoCs through pre-silicon verification, integration, and silicon bring-up.
• Experience technically leading and mentoring small, highly specialized engineering teams.