Tooling and automation engineer Full-time

lowRISC is a non-profit community interest company, using collaborative engineering to develop and maintain open source silicon designs and tools. We are producing high-quality, security-focused, open, and flexible IP. Our expertise includes processor and SoC design — with a particular focus on hardware security, design verification, RISC-V tools, and the LLVM compiler. lowRISC’s mission is to unlock the potential of open source hardware, with more flexible, accessible and efficient silicon solutions for a new era of computing.

This role would be an exciting position for a skilled engineer who will appreciate the freedom to explore and invent in the open. lowRISC provides the opportunity to work within a team exploring the full hardware/software stack on a broad range of challenging projects.

Job Summary

The successful candidate will have demonstrated expertise in automation and software tooling. Experience with hardware design could be beneficial but is not essential. This role involves taking over the design and maintenance of a growing suite of tools that aid the development of a reference quality open source SoC. This includes code generators, test and verification tooling, documentation generation, continuous integration, and more. lowRISC is an ambitious not-for-profit company with a small core team, so you will be heavily involved in the project’s development direction. This role will involve frequent work with external contributors and collaborators as well as the wider open source community. Being a community interest company, we are keen on promoting the adoption of and contribution to existing open source projects (e.g. Verilator, Cocotb) as well as the creation of new open tooling.

Tooling to configure, test, and generate our SoC designs is an essential part of our mission. It’s often treated as an afterthought, but is essential for developer productivity, and for delivering high quality, flexible IP. You will lead the development of this tooling, working with key stakeholders to define what’s needed and create and deliver a development roadmap and test strategy. You will be responsible for ensuring lowRISC and its projects have appropriate automation and continuous integration in place for our hardware and firmware development and testing, and generally increasing engineering productivity and output quality through efficient and effective tooling and scripts.

Practical experience with Python, C or C++ is essential.

Candidates should be have experience or demonstrated interest in some of:

• large-scale open source development
• SoC design
• hardware design
• continuous integration
• automation.

Industrial experience and higher degree levels are valued, but we will also consider an enthusiastic recent graduate with a strong academic record. A good standard of written and spoken English is essential.

You must have the right to work in the UK. Starting salary is 40-65K GBP depending on experience. Benefits include a generous employer pension contribution (up to 12.5%) and holiday allowance (33 days including public holidays). You will join us at our offices in ideaSpace West, Cambridge.

Closing date: 4th August 2019

Working at lowRISC

lowRISC’s team is based in Cambridge, UK, co-located with high tech startups of all kinds and with close links to researchers in computer architecture at the University of Cambridge. We work with engineers at partner organisations and open source communities around the world every day, creating hardware designs and best practices for robust open silicon infrastructure development and verification, for a variety of projects. Our work includes a significant long term silicon program, planning to tape out at scale, in collaboration with a number of major industry partners.

lowRISC is a collaborative organisation of dedicated, innovative and highly talented professionals, at the heart of the open hardware revolution. We are a growing and inclusive team, which values everyone’s strengths, and where hardware, software, test and documentation roles are all appreciated and connected. We support each other to deliver great work together, and to learn and grow both as a team and as individuals. lowRISC is a small and friendly organisation, with a relaxed professional culture and a fairly flat structure focussed on getting work done and thriving together.

This is a great time to join lowRISC and an opportunity to be part of a growing wave of open hardware innovation and to build the high quality, shared and open infrastructure needed for the future of specialised and adaptable computing systems.

We do not discriminate against any employee or candidate because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

Find out more at lowrisc.org/jobs