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Senior FPGA Engineer
Posted Sep 11, 2026 · We last checked this listing on Oct 6, 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.
About your past
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?
What they are checking: 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.
What they are checking: 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?
What they are checking: 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.
What they are checking: practical debugging skill and comfort operating without a clean lab environment
What would you do
Say you find a timing closure problem two days before a planned production deployment. What do you do?
What they are checking: 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?
What they are checking: 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If you joined a team with an existing FPGA codebase and processes you thought were outdated, how would you go about changing them without disrupting delivery?
What they are checking: judgment about influencing team practices tactfully, matching the responsibility to help craft development processes
About the work
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?
What they are checking: 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?
What they are checking: 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?
What they are checking: 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?
What they are checking: depth of computer architecture understanding beyond textbook definitions
What's your experience with TCP/UDP or multicast networking in the context of hardware design?
What they are checking: 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?
What they are checking: whether they take verification rigor as seriously as the stakes of the environment demand
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As published by Chicago Trading Company.
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