About OLIX

AI is growing faster than any technology in history and the explosion in demand has created a massive infrastructure gap; we can no longer build chips or power stations fast enough to keep up. The industry is still leaning on a ten-year-old hardware blueprint that has reached its limit. A new paradigm that is faster and more efficient will be the biggest economic opportunity of the next century and create the most important company of the next decade. The OLIX Decode Accelerator 1 (DX-1) is the first accelerator architected specifically for decode. Rack-scale co-design of logic, data movement, packaging, optics and interconnect enables a step change in system level performance.

The Role

As a Staff Embedded Software Engineer, you will be the design authority for a major area of the DX-1 platform firmware, within the overall platform architecture. This is the software that makes a rack of custom silicon bootable, manageable and observable, from pre-silicon simulation and FPGA prototypes through first silicon into production.

The kind of work you would own: bare-metal and real-time firmware on resource-constrained cores, embedded Linux on the platform processors, the BMC and management plane, and register-level control of the ASIC over its management link. You will report to the Platform Architect who leads the Embedded team and work closely with the FPGA, ASIC and Systems Software teams.

You bring exceptional depth on both sides of the hardware-software boundary, the judgment to identify what matters most and why, and the ability to influence and align engineering teams without relying on formal authority. It is a hands-on individual-contributor role. We will judge it by what others can build on: specs other teams work to, firmware that is ready when the hardware is, and designs that still hold up a year on.

Responsibilities

Lead a major area of the platform firmware. Boot and update, platform management or register-level control of the ASIC, agreed with you based on your strengths. Own its design, interfaces and roadmap within the platform architecture, and be accountable for it reaching production.

Make the interfaces explicit. Write down the contracts your area depends on and exposes, from register maps to update and telemetry flows, so the teams on either side can build against them.

Support bring-up and validation. When a bring-up or test problem turns out to be in boot, drivers or the management plane, you are the person who gets called. Help the teams running it get to the cause, and write up what you find so nobody has to rediscover it.

Define failure and update behaviour. How a fault in a node, rail or link is contained so it does not take out the rack, what gets logged so we can find the cause, and what happens if a firmware update is interrupted halfway.

Build things the team keeps using. Reference implementations, firmware tests on the infrastructure the validation teams already run, and contributions to the device models.

Pick the problems that matter. Identify the highest-impact technical risks in the platform firmware and at its interfaces to the FPGA and silicon teams, and make sure they get solved.

Develop the senior engineers around you. Review their designs as well as their code, set them up to lead areas of their own, and take an active part in hiring.

Skills & Experience

Depth on both sides of the hardware-software boundary. Bare-metal or RTOS firmware on resource-constrained cores, and embedded Linux BSP work (Yocto/OpenEmbedded, U-Boot or UEFI, drivers, device tree).

Systems fundamentals. Memory ordering and barriers, coherent and non-coherent shared memory, synchronisation with and without atomics, interrupt latency, and timing and memory-bandwidth budgets.

Taken firmware through a silicon or board bring-up, from pre-silicon simulation or emulation and FPGA prototypes to first power-on, and able to walk us through what went wrong and how it was found. More than one generation, or firmware for an ASIC whose tape-out you worked towards, is a significant advantage.