Associate Fellow – Software Full Time NEW

Are you looking for a unique opportunity to be a part of something great? Want to join a 17,000-member team that works on the technology that powers the world around us? Looking for an atmosphere of trust, empowerment, respect, diversity, and communication? How about an opportunity to own a piece of a multi-billion dollar (with a B!) global organization? We offer all that and more at Microchip Technology Inc.

People come to work at Microchip because we help design the technology that runs the world. They stay because our culture supports their growth and stability. They are challenged and driven by an incredible array of products and solutions with unlimited career potential. Microchip’s nationally-recognized Leadership Passage Programs support career growth where we proudly enroll over a thousand people annually. We take pride in our commitment to employee development, values-based decision making, and strong sense of community, driven by our Vision, Mission, and 11 Guiding Values; we affectionately refer to it as the Aggregate System and it’s won us countless awards for diversity and workplace excellence.

Our company is built by dedicated team players who love to challenge the status quo; we did not achieve record revenue and over 30 years of quarterly profitability without a great team dedicated to empowering innovation. People like you.

Visit our careers page to see what exciting opportunities and company perks await!

Job Description

Microchip’s Data Center Solutions Business Unit (DCS) is entering a new era. Our Storage Controllers, PCIe Switches, NVMe Controllers, and smart memory products run inside the infrastructure that trains and serves the world’s AI workloads — and the way we build those products must evolve just as quickly as the workloads they enable.

As an Associate Fellow – Software, you will serve as a senior technical authority responsible for optimizing and modernizing the full spectrum of engineering systems used to produce our data center products — firmware, systems software, DevOps platforms, and test architecture — and for driving the AI-era transformation of how those systems operate. You will set the vision for an AI-native Agentic engineering organization and, working alongside Microchip’s established firmware, DevOps, test, systems, and silicon teams, help make it real.

This is a senior hands-on role executed in partnership with the internal. You will architect, prototype, and co-develop — contributing code, reference implementations, and agentic tooling — while empowering those teams to adopt, operate, and scale what you build together. Your influence will span Microchip’s Flash Controller, PCIe Switch, and memory-attach product lines, reach into how firmware and silicon teams design, verify, and bring up next-generation products, and — where opportunity permits — extend into the products themselves through AI-enabled capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Drive architectural optimization of the end-to-end engineering systems used to produce our products — source control, CI/CD, reproducible environments, hardware-in-the-loop test farms, and release engineering — in partnership with internal DevOps and platform teams.
• Define and drive the AI-era engineering vision for DCS: agentic developer tooling, AI-augmented verification, autonomous test, intelligent observability, and AI-native release pipelines — personally prototyping the foundational pieces and scaling what works through partner teams.
• Shape the strategy for test and verification automation, including pre-silicon software validation, post-silicon bring-up automation, compliance testing, and protocol conformance (NVMe, PCIe) — working with the test and verification teams who operate these systems.
• Provide senior technical leadership across the data center software stack — firmware, embedded Linux/RTOS subsystems, host drivers, management, diagnostics, and telemetry — driving architectural coherence in collaboration with the teams that own each area.
• Extend platform and AI investments into firmware and silicon engineering workflows, so firmware and silicon teams share a continually improving, increasingly AI-native engineering backbone.
• Roll up your sleeves to co-build alongside internal teams — contributing reference implementations, agentic workflows, and critical components, and mentoring senior engineers by building with them.
• Where opportunity permits, partner with architecture and product teams to infuse AI capabilities into DCS products themselves — on-device intelligence, adaptive telemetry, and intelligent diagnostics.
• Establish evaluation, governance, and safety practices for AI/agentic tooling used in production engineering workflows — covering IP, security, reproducibility, and data handling.
• Set standards for observability, performance, and reliability across firmware and systems software; influence hiring, technical roadmaps, and cross-BU engineering practices; represent Microchip in relevant technical forums.

Requirements/Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Electrical Engineering
• 20+ years of relevant experience
• 15+ years of experience in data-center-class software engineering, with demonstrated product impact
• 10+ years combined hands-on experience across systems software, DevOps/platform engineering, and test architecture for complex hardware/software products.
• Demonstrated experience personally designing, building, and deploying agentic systems, LLM-based tooling, or AI-augmented engineering workflows in a production or product-engineering context.
• Working knowledge of Ethernet, NVMe and PCIe protocols and the storage and connectivity products built on them.
• Fluency in modern software stacks (Python, Go, C/C++, TypeScript as applicable), modern ML/LLM frameworks, and orchestration patterns for agentic systems (tool use, retrieval, evals, guardrails).
• Strong systems thinking, written/verbal communication, and ability to influence across engineering, product, and executive audiences — while remaining hands-on in the code.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Electrical Engineering
• Working knowledge of Ethernet and related data center networking stacks.
• Experience transforming engineering organizations at scale — raising developer productivity, test maturity, or release velocity through platform and AI investments.
• Experience applying agentic or AI-assisted methods to firmware and silicon engineering workflows (verification, coverage, RTL, bring-up).
• Experience with Ethernet, Enterprise Flash Controllers, PCIe Switches, or NVMe/NVMe-oF products.
• Familiarity with firmware development environments for ARM, RISC-V, or MIPS-based embedded subsystems.
• Background contributing to open-source AI tooling, agent frameworks, or engineering-productivity platforms.

Travel Time

0% – 25%

Physical Attributes

Feeling, Hearing, Other, Seeing, Talking, Works Alone, Works Around Others

Physical Requirements

10% walking, 10% standing, 80% sitting, 100% in doors; Usual business hours

Pay Range

We offer a total compensation package that ranks among the best in the industry. It consists of competitive base pay, restricted stock units, and quarterly bonus payments. In addition to these components, our package includes health benefits that begin day one, retirement savings plans, and an industry leading ESPP program with a 2 year look back feature. Find more information about all our benefits at the link below:

Benefits of working at Microchip

The annual base salary range for this position, which could be performed in the US, is $150,000 – $260,000.*

• Range is dependent on numerous factors including job location, skills and experience.

Microchip Technology Inc is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law.

For more information on applicable equal employment regulations, please refer to the Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal Poster.

To all recruitment agencies: Microchip Technology Inc. does not accept unsolicited agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to our recruiting team or other Microchip employees. Microchip is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.