Senior FPGA SDK Architect for Robotics & AI

191 Altera Corporation; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 232,000 - 341,000; Full time

Job summary

Altera is seeking a Senior Software Architect to help build our Physical AI SDK—a developer-facing platform enabling robotics and drones to use FPGA acceleration via portable, high-performance APIs. You will connect frameworks such as NVIDIA Holoscan, ROS 2, Linux, and ONNX Runtime to Altera FPGA platforms.

This hands-on role combines software architecture, hardware/software integration, and customer-focused solution delivery, with mentoring across architecture to release.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS/CE/EE or related field, 15+ years experience.
• Strong C++ and Linux systems-development skills, incl. concurrency and debugging.
• Experience designing and shipping SDKs or developer-facing platforms.
• Understanding of CPU/GPU/FPGA data movement and high-speed I/O.
• Experience with Holoscan, ROS 2, GStreamer, ffmpeg, or OpenCV.
• Experience with hardware-accelerated video/vision pipelines.
• Strong communication and ownership of cross-functional projects.

Responsibilities

• Define and guide SDK architecture, APIs, hardware abstraction, device discovery, lifecycle management, diagnostics, and plugin interfaces.
• Architect high-performance modules for sensor ingestion, camera and video pipelines, ISP, compression, memory and buffer management, synchronization, networking, localization, and AI pre-processing.
• Work with engineering to integrate FPGA acceleration into Holoscan and ROS 2 workflows, including zero-copy data paths and DMA.
• Develop Linux-based C++ libraries, Python bindings, utilities, deployment tools, and documentation.
• Collaborate with FPGA, hardware, AI, systems, and customer teams to validate latency, throughput, resource utilization, and reliability.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership from architecture through release.

Skills

C++

Linux

Concurrency

SDK design

ROS 2

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering/related

Tools

Holoscan

ROS 2

GStreamer

ffmpeg

OpenCV

Job description

Altera is seeking a Senior Software Architect to help build our Physical AI SDK—a developer-facing platform enabling robotics and drones to use FPGA acceleration via portable, high-performance APIs. You will connect frameworks such as NVIDIA Holoscan, ROS 2, Linux, and ONNX Runtime to Altera FPGA platforms.

This hands-on role combines software architecture, hardware/software integration, and customer-focused solution delivery, with mentoring across architecture to release.