Senior Firmware Engineer

About Celestial AI

As Generative AI continues to advance, the performance drivers for data center infrastructure are shifting from systems-on-chip (SOCs) to systems of chips. In the era of Accelerated Computing, data center bottlenecks are no longer limited to compute performance, but rather the system’s interconnect bandwidth, memory bandwidth, and memory capacity. Celestial AI’s Photonic Fabric™ is the next-generation interconnect technology that delivers a tenfold increase in performance and energy efficiency compared to competing solutions.

The Photonic Fabric™ is available to our customers in multiple technology offerings, including optical interface chiplets, optical interposers, and Optical Multi-chip Interconnect Bridges (OMIB). This allows customers to easily incorporate high bandwidth, low power, and low latency optical interfaces into their AI accelerators and GPUs. The technology is fully compatible with both protocol and physical layers, including standard 2.5D packaging processes. This seamless integration enables XPUs to utilize optical interconnects for both compute-to-compute and compute-to-memory fabrics, achieving bandwidths in the tens of terabits per second with nanosecond latencies.

This innovation empowers hyperscalers to enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of AI processing by optimizing the XPUs required for training and inference, while significantly reducing the TCO2 impact. To bolster customer collaborations, Celestial AI is developing a Photonic Fabric ecosystem consisting of tier-1 partnerships that include custom silicon/ASIC design, system integrators, HBM memory, assembly, and packaging suppliers.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As Senior Firmware Engineer, you will be a key player in the architecture and the full lifecycle development of an AI platform system, including requirements, design, code, and test. In this role, you will be part of a team developing next generation AI/ML solutions using the Celestial AI Photonic Fabric Architecture. You will be responsible for developing production-grade firmware for Celestial AI’s photonic fabric product lineup and developing firmware APIs for resource management and optimization. You will collaborate closely with hardware and software teams to implement the communication management software for different Photonic Fabric use cases.  

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Demonstrate best practices in software development and documentation to deliver high-quality software on tight schedules while meeting all requirements.
• Actively engage in code reviews, discussions to share knowledge, and improve code quality
• Participate in gathering technical requirements, contributing to firmware and software design specifications
• Provide support to both internal and external SW and HW development teams
• Provide guidance on test plans for lab characterization once design comes back from fab

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree with 8+ years of experience, or Master’s degree with 6+ years of experience in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Information Technology or a related technical field.
• At least 5 years of hands-on experience in firmware or embedded software development.
• Deep proficiency in C (required) and/or C++ (highly desired) for embedded systems.
• Demonstrated experience with microcontroller architectures (e.g., ARM Cortex-M/R/A, ESP32, RISC-V) and their peripherals. You understand the nuances of clocking, interrupts, DMA, and memory-mapped registers.
• Proven ability to debug complex hardware/firmware issues on the bench using:

• In-circuit debuggers (JTAG/SWD) with GDB.
• Oscilloscopes: Experience reading signal waveforms, verifying timing, and identifying glitches.
• Logic Analyzers: For decoding digital bus traffic (SPI, I2C, UART).
• Multimeters/Power Supplies: For basic electrical troubleshooting.

• Experience in writing bare-metal drivers and working directly with device registers.
• Familiarity with version control systems (Git preferred) and bug tracking tools.
• Strong problem-solving skills with an investigative, "get to the bottom of it" mindset.
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, for collaborating with hardware, QA, and software teams.

LOCATION: Santa Clara, CA

For California Location:

As an early stage start up, we offer an extremely attractive total compensation package inclusive of competitive base salary, bonus and a generous grant of our valuable early-stage equity. The target base salary for this role is approximately $185,000.00 - $225,000.00. The base salary offered may be slightly higher or lower than the target base salary, based on the final scope as determined by the depth of the experience and skills demonstrated by candidate in the interviews.

We offer great benefits (health, vision, dental and life insurance), collaborative and continuous learning work environment, where you will get a chance to work with smart and dedicated people engaged in developing the next generation architecture for high performance computing.

Celestial AI Inc. is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer.

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