FPGA engineer recruitment
on contract or permanent terms.

Two hiring patterns

FPGA work is split between teams that need someone for a defined stretch of delivery and teams that are building a long-term capability. The first pattern calls for a contractor who can read an unfamiliar codebase quickly and start producing useful work. The second calls for a permanent engineer who will still be improving the architecture in three years.

Good FPGA engineer recruitment treats these as separate searches with different candidates and different timescales. We run both, and we are careful to agree with the client at the start which one a vacancy is. A role described loosely as a contract with a view to permanent often fits neither pattern well.

A typical search

A manufacturer of test and measurement equipment in South Wales had planned a product refresh around a new FPGA family. The permanent engineer who had been leading the port left part-way through, and the replacement search was going to take a long time. The product launch was tied to a trade event and could not slide.

The company asked for a contractor. A generalist agency offered a mix of embedded software engineers and one candidate who had mostly written testbenches. Joel asked the engineering manager practical questions about the vendor toolchain and the existing constraints file, and used the answers to describe the work to engineers on our own list who were available for contract work.

A contractor with experience of the same vendor family started within a short time. He spent his first week reading the code and fixing a timing closure problem that had been waiting for someone with the time to look at it. The port was finished before the event.

The company then asked about a permanent hire, and the contractor's presence made that search easier. The manager now knew exactly what the job involved, so the brief was precise. We found a permanent engineer from a nearby company, and the contractor handed over before he left.

Firmware and the layers around it

Many FPGA roles shade into firmware, board bring-up and embedded Linux. We recruit across that boundary, so a vacancy that does not fit a single heading still reaches the right engineers.