Senior Software Architect (Physical AI)

Location: San Jose, California, United States. Travel requirements: 30%.

Salary: $231.5K–$341.1K USD annually for the Bay Area, California.

Company

Develops FPGA platforms and a Physical AI SDK for robotics and drone applications.

What you will do

• Define and guide SDK architecture, APIs, hardware abstraction, device discovery, lifecycle management, diagnostics, and plugin interfaces.
• Architect high-performance sensor, camera, video, ISP, compression, memory, synchronization, networking, localization, and AI pre-processing modules.
• Integrate FPGA acceleration into NVIDIA Holoscan and ROS 2 workflows using zero-copy data paths, DMA, metadata, timestamping, QoS, and deterministic execution.
• Develop Linux-based C++ libraries, Python bindings, utilities, deployment tools, documentation, and reference applications.
• 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.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, plus 15+ years of relevant experience.
• Strong C++ and Linux systems-development skills, including concurrency, performance optimization, and debugging.
• Experience designing and shipping SDKs, middleware, runtimes, device frameworks, or developer-facing platform software.
• Understanding of data movement across CPU, GPU, FPGA, DMA, shared memory, and high-speed I/O.
• Experience with Holoscan, ROS 2, GStreamer, ffmpeg, OpenCV, or comparable robotics or real-time frameworks.
• Strong communication skills and ownership of complex cross-functional projects.

Nice to have

• Experience with hirify.global FPGAs, PCIe, Ethernet, MIPI CSI-2/D-PHY, GMSL, FPGA acceleration, or HLS/RTL integration.
• Experience with end-to-end robotics pipelines, camera systems, ISP pipelines, video compression, sensor fusion, SLAM, or robotics perception.
• Familiarity with zero-copy, RDMA, GPUDirect, high-speed Ethernet, embedded Linux, Yocto, containers, and cross-compilation.
• Experience defining SDK roadmaps, compatibility policies, release criteria, and developer documentation.

Culture & Benefits

• Regular full-time employment with incentive opportunities based on individual and company performance.
• Hands-on collaboration across software, FPGA, hardware, AI, systems, and customer teams.
• Artificial intelligence is used to screen, assess, or select applicants.
• Applicants must be eligible for any required U.S. export authorizations.