Qualcomm
Hardware System Design Engineer, Senior or Staff
$122K–$183K
San Diego, California · On-site · Staff · Full-time · Posted Sep 17, 2026
- Experience
- 5+ years in system architecture, hardware board design, and signal-integrity simulations; 10+ years typically expected for Staff consideration.
- Education
- Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree in Electrical/Electronics Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent practical experience.
About the job
Designs and verifies high-performance FPGA emulation boards and systems, leading board design, signal-integrity work, system architecture, lab bring-up, and production support.
What you'll do
- Own board design lifecycle, including schematic capture, PCB layout and stack-up, BOM management, and verification testing.
- Perform power and signal-integrity simulations for 10 Gbps+ signals and lead or support FPGA board design and system bring-up/debug.
- Coordinate system architecture and design trade-offs with customers and cross-functional teams; at Staff level, define architecture across platforms and guide team standards and engineers.
What they ask for
- Experience with board design, including 26+ layer PCB layout, FPGA board design (Xilinx and/or Altera), and FPGA HDL coding.
- Experience with 10 Gbps+ SERDES designs and power/signal-integrity simulations, including analysis and recommending design changes.
- Experience with DDR3/DDR4/DDR5 discrete memory board designs and system architecture; Staff candidates should have architecture experience across multiple boards/platforms.
- Familiarity with listed protocols, test equipment, board/system bring-up and debug, and basic Linux/Unix.
Nice to have
- Power supply design; signal-integrity and PDN simulations; DFM/DFT reviews; Python or Perl scripting; IPC CID or equivalent certification; production/NPI support.
- For Staff: experience setting board/system design methodology or standards across programs, or serving as a technical lead or architect.
Pay
$121,800.00 - $182,600.00 USD (base salary)
Tools
Xilinx, Altera, I2C, JTAG, UART, SPI, PCIe, Vivado
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative