2026 FPGA Internship at Taara in Sunnyvale, CA

About the Team

Born at X, Google’s Moonshot Factory, Taara is on a mission to connect billions of people lacking abundant and affordable internet today by pioneering the way we use light to deliver faster, cheaper, more reliable connectivity. We are bringing groundbreaking wireless optical communication and photonics chip technologies to the world to bridge the digital divide.

Joining Taara allows you to do the best work of your life as part of a multidisciplinary team of experts in optics, software, and hardware—all collaborating to solve the hardest connectivity challenges on a global scale. If you want to tackle problems that matter and build tools with real-world impact, we would love to meet you.

About the Role

As an FPGA Intern at Taara, you will be the bridge between high-level control algorithms and physical hardware. You will design and implement digital gateware that handles high-speed sensor data in real-time, but you won’t just be writing code. You will work directly with hardware in the lab, integrating sensors and actuators with the FPGA to test your designs.

Your work will be an important contribution to Taara’s next generation of Free Space Optical products, accelerating algorithms that enable fast, high-precision pointing of lasers across kilometers of turbulent air and correction of signal distortions to provide reliable, fiberless, high-capacity connectivity.

How you will make 10X Impact

• Accelerate Computation: Leverage high-performance FPGAs to drive interfaces and algorithms faster than is possible with software alone

• Verify and Simulate: Develop rigorous testbeds to validate your designs in simulation, ensuring reliable performance and avoiding hours of debugging on hardware

• Iterate and Prototype: Contribute clean, well-documented designs that can move from a "lab experiment" to a field-deployed solution

• Integrate Systems: Work closely with the hardware and software teams to integrate your solutions into the Taara system architecture

What you should have

• Currently pursuing a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field

• Strong foundation in digital design fundamentals

• Proficiency in SystemVerilog/Verilog

• Location: Ability to work in the Sunnyvale office at least 3 days per week

It’d be great if you also had one or more of these

• Experience with Xilinx tools and FPGAs (Vivado, Ultrascale+)

• Sensor Integration: Experience interfacing serial peripherals (I2C, SPI, etc) with FPGAs

• Embedded Systems: Experience interfacing embedded processors with FPGAs

• Digital Signal Processing: Experience simulating and implementing DSP algorithms

• Control Theory: Experience with closed-loop control systems

• Proficiency with Python and C/C++

What we offer

• Competitive salary ($7,000-$11,000/month depending on degree).

• Direct mentorship from industry-leading engineers in a "moonshot" environment.

• Housing assistance may be provided.

• Opportunity to work on technology that has the potential to change how billions of people access the internet.