Jobs › Chicago Trading Company
Senior FPGA Engineer
Posted Sep 11, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Sep 20, 2026
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Likely interview questions for this role
Written from this job description, not a generic list. Each one notes what the interviewer is really checking.
Behavioral
Walk me through a time you had to shave latency out of an FPGA design that was already considered tight. What did you find and how did you fix it?
whether the candidate has real hands-on experience squeezing latency at the level this role requires, not just theoretical knowledge
Tell me about a time your design decisions had to be justified to people who weren't hardware engineers, like traders or quants.
ability to translate technical tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders, which the role explicitly requires
Tell me about a code review where you pushed back on someone else's design, or someone pushed back on yours. How did it resolve?
whether they can lead technical standards without being territorial, since the role includes championing best practices
Describe a time you had to debug a subtle hardware bug that only showed up under real production conditions, not in simulation.
practical debugging skill and comfort operating without a clean lab environment
Technical
How would you approach designing a low-latency pipeline that reads market data off the wire, parses it, and triggers a decision, all in hardware?
depth of practical FPGA architecture knowledge specific to trading data paths
Tell me about the tradeoffs between using SystemVerilog versus VHDL on a project. When have you made that call and why?
real fluency with the named HDLs rather than surface familiarity with one
Describe a project where you had to build tooling in Python or C++ to support your FPGA testbenches. What problem was the tooling solving?
whether they treat software tooling as a first-class part of the FPGA workflow, as the posting implies
How do you think about the tradeoff between pipelining for throughput and minimizing pure latency in a design?
depth of computer architecture understanding beyond textbook definitions
What's your experience with TCP/UDP or multicast networking in the context of hardware design?
whether the nice-to-have networking knowledge is real or aspirational
What does a good verification strategy look like for a design going straight into a live trading system, where a bug could mean real financial loss?
whether they take verification rigor as seriously as the stakes of the environment demand
Situational
Say you find a timing closure problem two days before a planned production deployment. What do you do?
how the candidate balances schedule pressure against risk in a high-stakes production environment
Imagine a quant comes to you wanting a new signal computed in hardware, but it would require restructuring part of the pipeline. How do you handle that conversation and the roadmap tradeoff?
how they balance short-term incremental delivery against long-term architectural integrity, as the posting frames it
If you joined a team with an existing FPGA codebase and processes you thought were outdated, how would you go about changing them without disrupting delivery?
judgment about influencing team practices tactfully, matching the responsibility to help craft development processes
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