Senior FPGA Designer

About Exegy

Exegy is a global leader in intelligent market data, advanced trading systems, and future-proof technology. Exegy serves as a trusted partner to the complete ecosystem of the buy-side, sell-side, exchanges, and financial services technology firms around the globe. Headquartered in St. Louis with regional offices in North America, the UK/Europe and Asia Pacific, Exegy has the global footprint to deliver world-class support and managed services to its customer base of elite financial market participants.

Job Summary

Exegy’s FPGA engineering team creates and maintains ultra‑low‑latency FPGA HDL building blocks and network IP cores used across Exegy products and within the nxFramework Firmware Development Kit (FDK). These components support hardware‑accelerated applications for leading financial institutions operating in performance‑sensitive trading environments.

The Senior FPGA Designer is a hands‑on technical contributor responsible for designing, implementing, verifying, and optimizing complex FPGA solutions. You will work across the full development lifecycle, from requirements and architecture through RTL development, timing closure, board‑level validation, test automation, and production support. You will also provide technical guidance to less‑experienced engineers and partner with FPGA Architects, software engineers, product teams, and solution teams to deliver maintainable, high‑performance designs.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain high‑performance FPGA logic and reusable HDL building blocks for ultra‑low‑latency applications.

• Translate product and technical requirements into detailed FPGA designs, interfaces, implementation plans, and verification strategies.

• Develop and review RTL using VHDL and/or Verilog, with a strong focus on latency, throughput, resource utilization, scalability, and maintainability.

• Own significant portions of the FPGA development lifecycle, including simulation, synthesis, place‑and‑route, timing analysis and closure, hardware bring‑up, board‑level testing, and release support.

• Implement and enhance networking and system protocol components such as TCP, UDP, Ethernet MAC/PCS, PCIe, and DMA at multiple speeds.

• Create and maintain automated test environments, unit tests, regression suites, coverage metrics, and hardware validation tools using Python and related technologies.

• Diagnose complex design, timing, integration, and performance issues across FPGA, hardware, firmware, and software boundaries.

• Conduct peer design and code reviews and help establish consistent engineering practices for quality, documentation, testing, and version control.

• Collaborate with FPGA Architects to evaluate design trade‑offs and ensure implementations align with broader platform architecture and long‑term product direction.

• Mentor FPGA Engineers, share technical knowledge, and contribute to onboarding and development of team members.

• Partner with product and solution teams to understand customer and business needs, propose practical technical solutions, and communicate risks, dependencies, and trade‑offs.

• Monitor developments in FPGA devices, toolchains, networking technologies, and low‑latency design techniques and recommend improvements to the team’s technology and methods.

Our Ideal Candidate Has:

• Degree in Electronic Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.

• Typically 5 or more years of professional FPGA design and development experience, including ownership of complex designs through implementation and hardware validation.

• Advanced proficiency in VHDL and/or Verilog and the ability to assess RTL for correctness, performance, maintainability, and resource efficiency.

• Strong understanding of the complete FPGA development flow, including simulation, synthesis, constraints, static timing analysis, timing closure, place‑and‑route, and on‑board debugging.

• Experience developing high‑speed networking, data‑movement, or system interfaces such as Ethernet, TCP/UDP, MAC/PCS, PCIe, and DMA.

• Hands‑on experience with FPGA development tools, preferably AMD/Xilinx Vivado, and modern source control and CI practices using Git and Jenkins or comparable tools.

• Experience using Python and Linux to support verification, automation, testing, and troubleshooting.

• Demonstrated ability to independently solve complex technical problems and communicate clearly with both technical and cross‑functional partners.

• Professional proficiency in English and French.

Preferred Qualifications

• Expe