Chip Designers Jobs (NOW HIRING)

This position is not eligible for Qualcomm immigration sponsorship.

Qualcomm Atheros, Inc. seeks a Software Engineer to join the WLAN HAL-PHY firmware team. You will bring deep, hands-on technical expertise across the full firmware development lifecycle — from architecture through lab bring-up and customer release. You will serve as a technical anchor on the team, setting design direction, driving silicon validation, and elevating firmware quality across next-generation WLAN chipsets. The team has adopted AI-assisted development workflows and tools, which you will use daily and help evolve as the toolchain matures.

• Hands-on technical depth: Write production-quality C/C++ firmware daily; this is not a coordination or review-only role.
• Architectural ownership: Drive design decisions independently, evaluate trade-offs, and document them for long-term team knowledge.
• Cross-functional influence: Collaborate as a peer with chip designers, RF engineers, and hardware board engineers.
• Mentorship and code quality: Raise the bar for junior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, pairing, and constructive feedback.
• Problem ownership: Tackle complex, ambiguous debug problems from triage to root cause and verified fix without constant direction.

This team treats generative AI tools as force multipliers. Engineers are expected to use AI coding assistants, MCP-powered analysis tools, and LLM-based agent workflows as part of daily development. You will generate firmware code with AI, review AI-produced diffs with rigor, and use AI agents to accelerate crash triage and root cause analysis. You will contribute improvements to the AI toolchain and ensure outputs are validated against hardware specs and architecture constraints.

• AI coding assistants: Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor for firmware generation and review.
• MCP server toolchains: cscope MCP for symbol navigation; swi-hw-sw MCP for SWI contract verification; SmartScope and TimeTravel for crash triage and root cause attribution.
• LLMCommittee: AI-driven multi-model code review for pre-submit quality gating.
• AI-assisted SDLC pipelines: requirements analysis, SW SDD, and code-gen agents spanning requirements through implementation.
• RCA tooling: LLM-based crash triage and regression RCA using memory dumps and log data.

• Lead software architecture enhancements using established SW design patterns; re-architect firmware modules and design new ones from the ground up.
• Write, review, and own production-quality low-level firmware in a resource-constrained embedded environment (small memory footprint DSP/ARM processors).
• Develop WLAN offload firmware on dedicated co-processor cores, independent of the host processor.
• Diagnose and resolve complex WLAN and RF system performance issues; analyze power, spectrum, and waveform quality using RF test equipment and IQ capture data.
• Design, implement, unit test, and document features for next-generation WLAN platforms (802.11be and beyond).
• Collaborate with chip designers, hardware board engineers, and RF specialists during silicon bring-up and lab validation.
• Optimize firmware for maximum throughput and minimal latency; profile and eliminate bottlenecks.
• Support customer launch and release cycles; resolve production field issues; occasional travel to customer sites may be required.
• Use AI coding assistants as active partners during firmware development—generating boilerplate, reviewing diffs, and iterating on HAL-PHY register access logic—while applying senior-level judgment to validate AI output against hardware specs and architecture patterns.
• Leverage MCP server toolchains for code navigation, HW register lookup, crash dump analysis, and root cause attribution to reduce manual investigation cycles.
• Participate in and help refine the team's AI-assisted SDLC pipeline, providing feedback on AI-generated artifacts and improving prompts and workflows over time.
• Drive technical documentation standards and code review culture across the team.

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field.

• Master’s degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field.
• 2+ years of software engineering or related work experience.
• 2+ years of experience with Database Management Software.
• 2+ years of experience with APIs.
• 1+ year of work experience with Git, Perforce, or other source code management systems.
• Candidates with up to 7 years are encouraged to apply.

EEO Employer: Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer; all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected classification.

Pay range and other compensation and benefits: $111,300.00 - $166,900.00. Salaries are one component of total compensation, which may include annual discretionary bonus programs and RSU grants. For more details about benefits, please contact Qualcomm Careers.