Facebook has posted multiple job openings for chip designers and firmware engineers, fueling speculation that the company may be looking to design its own chips going forward for its hardware efforts.
Many tech giants, like Apple, Google, Samsung, Huawei and others already design their own chips as a way of becoming more self-reliant and increasing the profit margins on their products.
According to one of the posts, the company is looking for an ‘ASIC and FPGA Design Engineer’ with expertise in designing ‘semi-custom and fully custom ASICs’.
“The role involves evaluating, developing and driving next generation technologies within Facebook. The candidate would need to work with software and system engineers to understand limitations of current hardware and use their expertise to build custom solutions targeted at multiple verticals including AI/ML, compression, and video encoding. This position is full-time and located in our Menlo Park office”
As can be seen from the job description, Facebook is looking to use its in-house chip designs for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications, but the company is also looking to hire a full-time SoC architect, who will be a part of its Computer Vision Team (Core Tech), and will work across ‘multiple technologies and disciplines such as algorithms, software, and hardware’.
Facebook also says it is looking for a Firmware Engineer with expertise in low-level embedded firmware architecture “to support development of state-of-the-art SoC with dedicated hardware accelerators (HWA) designed for computer vision and machine learning”. The successful candidate will apparently work with a team that includes algorithm, user experience, software, firmware and ASIC / FPGA experts.
