Architect/Staff Embedded Software Engineer
OLIX
Architect/Staff Embedded Software Engineer
OLIX
Optical compute hardware for AI inference
AI is growing faster than any technology in history and the explosion in demand has created a massive infrastructure gap; we can no longer build chips or power stations fast enough to keep up. The industry is still leaning on a ten-year-old hardware blueprint that has reached its limit. A new paradigm that is faster and more efficient will be the biggest economic opportunity of the next century and create the most important company of the next decade. The OLIX Decode Accelerator 1 (DX-1) is the first accelerator architected specifically for decode. Rack-scale co-design of logic, data movement, packaging, optics and interconnect enables a step change in system level performance.
As a Staff Embedded Software Engineer, you will be the design authority for a major area of the DX-1 platform firmware, within the overall platform architecture. This is the software that makes a rack of custom silicon bootable, manageable and observable, from pre-silicon simulation and FPGA prototypes through first silicon into production.
The kind of work you would own: bare-metal and real-time firmware on resource-constrained cores, embedded Linux on the platform processors, the BMC and management plane, and register-level control of the ASIC over its management link. You will report to the Platform Architect who leads the Embedded team and work closely with the FPGA, ASIC and Systems Software teams.
You bring exceptional depth on both sides of the hardware-software boundary, the judgment to identify what matters most and why, and the ability to influence and align engineering teams without relying on formal authority. It is a hands-on individual-contributor role. We will judge it by what others can build on: specs other teams work to, firmware that is ready when the hardware is, and designs that still hold up a year on.
Lead a major area of the platform firmware. Boot and update, platform management or register-level control of the ASIC, agreed with you based on your strengths. Own its design, interfaces and roadmap within the platform architecture, and be accountable for it reaching production.
Make the interfaces explicit. Write down the contracts your area depends on and exposes, from register maps to update and telemetry flows, so the teams on either side can build against them.
Support bring-up and validation. When a bring-up or test problem turns out to be in boot, drivers or the management plane, you are the person who gets called. Help the teams running it get to the cause, and write up what you find so nobody has to rediscover it.
Define failure and update behaviour. How a fault in a node, rail or link is contained so it does not take out the rack, what gets logged so we can find the cause, and what happens if a firmware update is interrupted halfway.
Build things the team keeps using. Reference implementations, firmware tests on the infrastructure the validation teams already run, and contributions to the device models.
Pick the problems that matter. Identify the highest-impact technical risks in the platform firmware and at its interfaces to the FPGA and silicon teams, and make sure they get solved.
Develop the senior engineers around you. Review their designs as well as their code, set them up to lead areas of their own, and take an active part in hiring.
Depth on both sides of the hardware-software boundary. Bare-metal or RTOS firmware on resource-constrained cores, and embedded Linux BSP work (Yocto/OpenEmbedded, U-Boot or UEFI, drivers, device tree).
Systems fundamentals. Memory ordering and barriers, coherent and non-coherent shared memory, synchronisation with and without atomics, interrupt latency, and timing and memory-bandwidth budgets.
Taken firmware through a silicon or board bring-up, from pre-silicon simulation or emulation and FPGA prototypes to first power-on, and able to walk us through what went wrong and how it was found. More than one generation, or firmware for an ASIC whose tape-out you worked towards, is a significant advantage.
Platform management in a rack-scale context. OpenBMC or equivalent, Redfish, PLDM over MCTP, and the buses underneath (I2C/SMBus/PMBus, SPI, UART), including power sequencing and fault isolation.
Register-level control of an ASIC or large FPGA over a management link, including against a simulation model before silicon exists. Precision timing (IEEE 1588 PTP, SyncE), SerDes or optical link bring-up, or secure boot would all be an advantage.
Technical leadership without formal authority. A specification, methodology, or tool you authored that teams outside your own adopted and still use, and the design document behind it.
Outstanding technical communicator. You can articulate architectural decisions and their consequences clearly to engineers, managers and senior leadership alike, and write design documents that other teams build to.
Competitive Salary: Commensurate with your experience, skills, and location
Equity & Ownership: Meaningful stock options. You’re not just joining the mission; you’re owning a piece of it
Proximity Bonus: We value your time. To minimise your commute and maximise your life, we offer an annual Living-Local Bonus if your residence is within 20 minutes of the office
Retirement Benefits:Employer-contributed retirement plans to help you build long-term financial security.
Due to U.S. export control regulations, candidates’ eligibility to work at OLIX depends on their most recent citizenship or permanent residency status. We are generally unable to consider applicants whose most recent citizenship or permanent residence is in certain restricted countries (currently including Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Russia, Belarus, China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Venezuela). Applicants who have subsequently obtained citizenship or permanent residency in another country not subject to these restrictions may still be eligible.
OLIX is a London-based AI chip company building optical compute infrastructure for frontier AI inference. Its product line includes specialized hardware components—chips, lasers, and interconnects—that allow each stage of token generation to run on purpose-built hardware rather than general-purpose GPUs. The X-1 platform distributes models across multiple chips linked by a slow-and-wide optical interconnect and uses a deterministic compiler to map work efficiently, while the DX-1 is the first decode accelerator that keeps models in on-chip SRAM without requiring advanced packaging or high-bandwidth memory. The company differentiates itself by providing end-to-end optical hardware designed for AI inference, rather than relying on traditional GPU-based inference pipelines. OLIX’s stated goal is to deliver the DX-1 to first customers by the second half of 2027 and to scale manufacturing and hiring across its global locations to support growth.
Explore more opportunities at OLIX