FPGA Engineer

Tell me about a time you had to squeeze more performance out of a design that was already in production. What did you measure first and what did you change?

What they are checking: whether they profile before optimizing and can show measurable latency wins

Tell me about a bug that only showed up under real trading conditions or high load, not in simulation. How did you find it?

What they are checking: comfort debugging timing-dependent or environment-specific issues that simulation can't catch

Tell me about a time you had to learn a new tool, protocol, or piece of hardware on your own with little guidance. How did you go about it?

What they are checking: self-direction and independent learning ability, since the role explicitly wants someone who drives their own growth

How do you go about documenting or teaching a complex piece of custom logic to a teammate who didn't write it?

What they are checking: willingness and ability to transfer knowledge on a small team where tribal knowledge is a risk

What draws you to working at a trading firm specifically, as opposed to another industry that needs FPGA engineers?

What they are checking: genuine motivation and fit for a high-pressure, latency-obsessed, entrepreneurial culture

Say you're moving data between the FPGA and host software over PCIe and you're seeing intermittent latency spikes. How do you track down the source?

What they are checking: understanding of the hardware/software boundary and debugging discipline across DMA, drivers, and fabric

If you had to choose between a design that's easier to verify and one that shaves off a few nanoseconds of latency, how do you decide which way to go?

What they are checking: judgment about tradeoffs between speed, correctness, and maintainability in a latency-obsessed environment

Imagine a trader tells you the options market-making system is reacting a few microseconds slower than it used to after a recent change. How do you start investigating?

What they are checking: systematic troubleshooting across the whole stack and comfort working directly with trading stakeholders

Walk me through an FPGA design you built from the ground up for a low-latency system. What was the architecture and where did the time actually go?

What they are checking: depth of hands-on experience with full system-on-chip design versus surface familiarity

How would you approach building an exchange protocol encoder/decoder in hardware for a market data feed you'd never worked with before?

What they are checking: ability to parse spec documents and translate protocol logic into deterministic hardware pipelines

What's your experience with networking at the FPGA level, things like MAC layer processing or custom TCP/UDP handling in logic?

What they are checking: real depth on network stack implementation in hardware versus general RTL experience

Describe your timing closure process on a design that was tight on the clock. What did you do when you couldn't just add pipeline stages?

What they are checking: practical skill with constraints, floorplanning, and real timing closure work, not textbook answers

What verification methods do you rely on for custom logic before it goes anywhere near production trading, and how do you decide when it's ready?

What they are checking: rigor and risk awareness given that bugs here have direct financial consequences