FPGA Intern

Job Description

About the Job

About The Team

Born at X, Google’s Moonshot Factory, Taara is on a mission to connect billions of people lacking abundant and affordable internet today by pioneering the way we use light to deliver faster, cheaper, more reliable connectivity. We are bringing groundbreaking wireless optical communication and photonics chip technologies to the world to bridge the digital divide.

Joining Taara allows you to do the best work of your life as part of a multidisciplinary team of experts in optics, software, and hardware—all collaborating to solve the hardest connectivity challenges on a global scale. If you want to tackle problems that matter and build tools with real-world impact, we would love to meet you.

About The Role

As an FPGA Intern at Taara, you will serve as the crucial link between high-level control algorithms and physical hardware. Your primary responsibility will be to design and implement digital gateware capable of handling high-speed sensor data in real-time. This role extends beyond mere coding, as you will actively engage with hardware in the lab, integrating sensors and actuators with FPGAs to rigorously test and validate your designs.

Your contributions will be vital to Taara’s next generation of Free Space Optical products. Specifically, you will be accelerating algorithms that enable fast, high-precision pointing of lasers across kilometers of turbulent air, and correcting signal distortions to deliver reliable, fiberless, and high-capacity connectivity.

How You Will Make 10X Impact

• Accelerate Computation: You will leverage high-performance FPGAs to drive interfaces and algorithms at speeds unattainable with software alone, significantly enhancing system performance.
• Verify and Simulate: You will develop comprehensive and rigorous testbeds to validate your digital designs in simulation, ensuring reliable performance and drastically reducing debugging time on physical hardware.
• Iterate and Prototype: You will contribute clean, well-documented, and robust designs that can seamlessly transition from experimental lab setups to deployable field solutions.
• Integrate Systems: You will collaborate closely with the hardware and software teams to integrate your FPGA solutions into the broader Taara system architecture, ensuring cohesive and efficient operation.

What You Should Have

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related technical field.
• A strong foundational understanding of digital design principles and concepts.
• Proficiency in SystemVerilog/Verilog for hardware description.
• Ability to work in the Sunnyvale office at least 3 days per week.

It’d be great if you also had one or more of these

• Experience with Xilinx development tools and FPGAs, such as Vivado and Ultrascale+.
• Sensor Integration: Hands-on experience interfacing serial peripherals (e.g., I2C, SPI) with FPGAs.
• Embedded Systems: Experience interfacing embedded processors with FPGAs.
• Digital Signal Processing: Experience with simulating and implementing DSP algorithms.
• Control Theory: Experience with closed-loop control systems.
• Proficiency with programming languages such as Python and C/C++.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary ranging from $7,000 to $11,000 per month, depending on the degree level.
• Direct mentorship from industry-leading engineers within an innovative “moonshot” environment.
• Housing assistance may be provided to eligible interns.
• A unique opportunity to contribute to technology that has the potential to fundamentally change how billions of people access the internet globally.