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Contract FPGA

Contract FPGA Consultant — Fractional Engagement

Open hourly rate

2-month contract — fractional, 20 hours per week

Fully remote, with occasional travel for hardware integrations
 

A space & defense company is hiring a Contract FPGA Consultant on a fractional basis to drive FPGA development through a focused two-month engagement. Real hardware, real deadlines and the flexibility of a 20-hour week for someone who can make those hours count.

The programme is moving and the team needs an FPGA specialist who can drop into an active design without a long runway, someone who has taken FPGAs from RTL through verification and onto hardware before, and who’s comfortable being the person the team turns to when the bench doesn’t match the simulation.

What you’ll be doing

  • Owning FPGA development through the engagement — architecture input, RTL design, simulation and verification
  • Writing and reviewing RTL (VHDL or Verilog/SystemVerilog) against defined requirements
  • Building and running testbenches to verify functionality before hardware
  • Closing timing, managing constraints and driving builds through synthesis and place & route
  • Supporting hardware bring-up and integration on site as needed — debugging at the board level when the FPGA meets the real world
  • Interfacing with electronics and systems engineers so the FPGA work lands cleanly in the wider design
  • Documenting the design and verification so it stands on its own after the engagement ends

What you’ll need

  • Proven FPGA design experience taken through to working hardware — not just simulation
  • Strong RTL skills in VHDL or Verilog/SystemVerilog
  • Verification experience — testbench development and simulation-driven debug
  • Timing closure, constraints and toolchain fluency (AMD/Xilinx Vivado, Intel Quartus, Microchip Libero or equivalent)
  • Hands-on hardware bring-up and integration experience — comfortable with scopes, logic analysers and lab debug
  • Familiarity with common interfaces and protocols (SPI, I2C, UART, LVDS, high-speed serial)
  • Sound engineering judgment — balancing risk against requirements, cost and a fixed clock
  • Clear written and verbal communication, and the ability to work independently on fractional hours
  • Willingness to travel occasionally for hardware integration activities

Nice to have

  • Space, defense or other high-reliability domain experience
  • Radiation-tolerant device families and mitigation techniques (TMR, EDAC, scrubbing)
  • Embedded/SoC FPGA experience (Zynq, PolarFire SoC or similar)
  • Board-level design awareness — you can read a schematic and talk to the layout engineer
  • Prior contract or fractional consulting work — you land and add value fast

Interested? – Click apply with an updated copy of your CV. I’ll come back to you within 48 hours. If you don’t hear back within 48 hours, please assume you haven’t been successful on this occasion.