Principal FPGA Engineer (RFSoC / DSP) Bristol – 5 Days Onsite Salary up to £100,000 package Must be eligible for SC Clearance I’m working with a fast-growing deep-tech engineering company developing cutting-edge Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) technology. Their platform transforms standard fibre-optic cables into real-time sensing networks, used to monitor borders, subsea infrastructure, rail networks, and environmental systems globally. Following significant international contract wins and rapid growth, they’re expanding their engineering team and looking for a Senior FPGA Engineer to help shape the next generation of their sensing platform. The Role This is a hands-on senior position combining deep technical FPGA work with leadership responsibilities. You’ll spend the majority of your time on high-performance FPGA development (~80%), while also mentoring engineers and influencing development practices and system architecture. Core Technology Xilinx / AMD RFSoC platforms (integrated ADC acquisition) Performance-critical front-end FPGA signal processing High channel-count acoustic data streaming Integration with NVIDIA-based ML platforms ⚙️ Key Responsibilities Design and implement high-performance FPGA architectures using RFSoC Develop and optimise DSP algorithms in FPGA fabric Collaborate with RF, hardware, and machine learning teams Support hardware bring-up and lab testing Improve engineering processes and development methodology Lead and mentor FPGA engineers Contribute to system-level architecture decisions ✅ What They’re Looking For Proven experience with Xilinx RFSoC and/or SDR systems Strong DSP fundamentals (math-level understanding) VHDL development using Vivado Experience delivering complex, performance-critical FPGA designs Ability to optimise for throughput, latency, and hardware constraints Comfortable working in lab/bench environments Eligible for SC Clearance ➕ Nice to Have MATLAB or Python for DSP modelling Multi-channel acquisition systems High-speed data interfaces Background in RF, defence, or sensing systems