Marlon James
Senior FPGA Engineer at Reliable Robotics Corporation
Gig Harbor, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMarlon James is a Senior FPGA Engineer with seven years of hands-on experience in avionics and high-bandwidth embedded systems, currently designing avionics hardware at Reliable Robotics. He combines deep VHDL-based FPGA design and verification with firmware and embedded Linux expertise (C/C++), and has applied DO-254/DO-178B practices on safety-critical platforms at Garmin. Marlon has contributed to prominent open-source projects—improving cocotb's test coverage and adding VHPI support to GHDL—demonstrating a strong focus on verification infrastructure and tooling. He’s comfortable across the full low-level stack from kernel and device drivers to FPGA backends and CI-integrated test automation. Based in Gig Harbor, WA, he brings a pragmatic verification-first approach that reduces risk in complex avionics and video systems. An uncommonly persistent QA engineer, he often surfaces subtle scheduler and library-loading issues before they reach production.
7 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
South Puget Sound Community CollegeB.S., Computer Engineering, B.S., Computer Engineering at Washington State University
Japanese
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (16)
test-automation10
verification10
pytest10
python10
cocotb10
simulator10
vhdl10
testing9
verilog9
testbench8
c178
c118
compiler-compiler7
compiler7
hardware6
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
cocotb/cocotb
Mar 2020 - Sep 2022
cocotb: Python-based chip (RTL) verification
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:1 release, 642 reviews, 31 commits in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Marlon focused on improving the testing infrastructure of the cocotb repository. They added and refactored tests, specifically using pytest, for the `BinaryValue` class and ensured they ran in the CI/CD pipeline. Furthermore, the user wrote a test to verify correct scheduling behaviour. These contributions aimed to increase the test coverage and ensure the reliability of the cocotb verification framework.
cocotbpythonvhdlveriloguvm
ghdl/ghdl
Mar 2021 - Apr 2021
VHDL 2008/93/87 simulator
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:1 review, 7 commits, 5 PRs in 1 month
Contributions summary:Marlon primarily contributed to the implementation and testing of the VHPI (VHDL Procedural Interface) within the GHDL simulator. Their work included adding the initial minimal VHPI implementation, including library loading and error support. They developed test suites to verify VHPI library loading and tracing capabilities. Furthermore, the user updated the license header for the source code files.
vhdlghdlsimulatortestbenchcompiler
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.