Firmware

Who you are

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience
• Strong C/C++ and software engineering fundamentals
• Experience building and debugging low-level software that interacts directly with hardware
• Depth in one or more of firmware, embedded systems, device runtimes, operating systems, or kernel/driver development
• Experience shipping software on real hardware into production
• Familiarity with technologies such as ARM, PCIe, DMA, HBM, DRAM, Ethernet, UART, RTOS, or FPGA systems
• Strong systems intuition around performance, concurrency, memory, reliability, and fault handling
• Hardware bring-up experience on a new chip or board
• Experience with boot ROMs, secure boot, MMUs, RTOS, or CPU initialization
• Experience with PCIe virtualization, FLR, SR-IOV, DMA, ring buffers, or high-speed device communication
• Experience building accelerator runtimes, schedulers, command processors, or other latency-critical execution systems
• Experience using architecture details such as caching, memory hierarchy, or on-chip fabrics to make software decisions at nanosecond-level timescales
• Experience solving ambiguous problems where the hardware and software architecture evolve together
• Strong communication across firmware, hardware, architecture, kernel, and inference teams

What the job involves

• This role owns the accelerator software that makes our chips usable
• You'll work across the layers that bring the chip to life and connect it to the host: the firmware that powers it on, the on-die software that initializes and manages it, and the kernel-level interface that exposes it to the rest of the inference stack
• The work spans three tightly-coupled domains; ASIC firmware, microcontroller firmware, and host-side kernel and drivers
• We hire engineers who are deep in one area and curious about the others
• This role spans across three work areas. You would specialize in one and contribute across the others as the team grows:
• ASIC Software— Collaboration on ASIC architecture, on-device inference instruction execution, CPU initialization, bootloaders, IO drivers, thermal and power management, DMA data transfer, on-chip application software, and validation. The code that runs on the die itself on its various embedded CPUs
• Platform Software — microcontroller architecture and software for power sequencing, telemetry, and firmware update, and the foundational work that takes the chip from powered off to responsive. Involves close collaboration with the hardware team in the schematic and bring-up phases
• Host-side Kernel and Drivers — the host software that presents Sohu as a device the rest of the stack can program against. Linux kernel drivers, PCIe-visible memory management, high-throughput low-latency ring buffer command queues, and SRIOV VF device management

Benefits

• Competitive Salary and Equity - We offer a competitive salary and equity package that aligns with industry standards
• Benefits - Your wellbeing is important to us. We offer unlimited PTO, life insurance, and a 401(k)
• Full Insurance Coverage - Our insurance includes full medical, dental, and vision with 100% of premium covered