Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer — Silicon Photonics Control

PSI Quantum; Milpitas (CA); Remote; USD 208,000 - 245,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

401(k) with company match

Equity

Job summary

PsiQuantum is seeking a senior embedded firmware engineer to translate photonic device and system requirements into robust control algorithms, firmware, APIs, diagnostics, and system software.

The role focuses on complex embedded hardware systems with closed-loop control, real-time behavior, and strong collaboration with hardware bring-up and validation teams. This is a senior individual contributor position in a cutting-edge quantum hardware program.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in Electrical/Computer Engineering, Controls Engineering, Physics, or a related technical discipline.
• Significant professional experience developing firmware and software for complex embedded systems.
• Strong programming experience in C/C++ for embedded systems.
• Experience with Python or similar languages for automation, system test, data analysis, and hardware control.
• Strong understanding of embedded processors, memory architectures, interrupts, timing, concurrency, and hardware interfaces.
• Experience with RTOS and/or embedded Linux environments.
• Demonstrated experience developing software that directly controls physical hardware.
• Strong understanding of feedback and closed-loop control systems.
• Experience implementing calibration, compensation, monitoring, and control algorithms.
• Experience with embedded communication protocols such as SPI, IC, UART, GPIO, Ethernet, or similar interfaces.

Responsibilities

• Architect, develop, and maintain embedded firmware for control and management of silicon photonics products.
• Develop firmware that interfaces with photonic devices, ASICs/FPGAs, DACs, ADCs, temperature sensors, power-management devices, and other board-level electronics.
• Implement closed-loop control algorithms for optical operating points, temperature, power, bias, alignment, switching state, and other device-specific control variables.
• Understand system dynamics, stability, convergence, calibration, tolerances, noise, drift, and failure modes when designing control loops.
• Develop real-time and event-driven firmware for complex embedded systems.
• Develop device initialization, calibration, configuration, monitoring, fault management, and recovery mechanisms.
• Define and implement state machines governing system startup, operation, fault handling, recovery, and shutdown.
• Work with system architects to define the overall software and firmware control architecture of the product.
• Support remote firmware/software update mechanisms, configuration management, versioning, and system recovery.
• Design firmware and software with reliability, testability, manufacturability, and field serviceability in mind.
• Develop automated calibration and test capabilities that can transition from engineering environments into manufacturing.
• Define manufacturing configuration, calibration data, device parameters, and nonvolatile storage requirements.
• Support production test, system qualification, reliability testing, and failure analysis. Develop diagnostic capabilities that allow manufacturing and field teams to quickly isolate failures.

Skills

C/C++

RTOS/Embedded Linux

Firmware development

Python

System-level debugging

Hardware bring-up

Education

BS/MS in Electrical/Computer Engineering or related field

Tools

SPI

UART

Ethernet

GPIO

Job description

PsiQuantum is seeking a senior embedded firmware engineer to translate photonic device and system requirements into robust control algorithms, firmware, APIs, diagnostics, and system software.

The role focuses on complex embedded hardware systems with closed-loop control, real-time behavior, and strong collaboration with hardware bring-up and validation teams. This is a senior individual contributor position in a cutting-edge quantum hardware program.