ASIC Engineer  ·  AI Practitioner  ·  Civic Leader  ·  Explorer

Almir Balihodžić

“He, who believes to be someone, has ceased to become someone.” — Socrates

About

Almir Balihodžić

Born on 9 October 1985 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I have been living in Austria since 1992, growing up in the Mühlviertel region of Upper Austria.

After the Federal Higher Technical Institute (HTL) in Leonding, I studied Hardware/Software Systems Engineering and Embedded Systems Design at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria in Hagenberg, earning my MSc in 2010.

My professional career spans RF system engineering, digital design, and six years designing mixed-signal ASICs as a member of the Apple Technology Engineering Austria team in Linz — at the very frontier of consumer silicon.

From May 2017 to October 2025 I served as a Municipal Councilor of the City of Linz.

In January 2026 I stepped away from the desk to become an Explorer by Design — a self-directed study in global systems, human-centric thinking and real-time adaptation.

I am a hardware engineer with technical depth, project responsibility and experience in decision-making bodies, who wants to combine technology, product and leadership.

  Linz, Upper Austria   Open to roles in Linz, Vienna & Munich   Austrian   BKS (Native)  ·  German (C2)  ·  English (C1)

Experience

Jan 2026 — present

Global Explorer by Design

Worldwide

The best engineers understand the world they build for. After 15+ years in the industry, a self-directed study in global systems, human-centric design, and the ultimate test of adapting to new variables in real-time.

2019 — 2025

Digital Design Engineer

Apple Technology Engineering Austria B.V. & Co. KG  ·  Linz

RTL design and unit-level verification of digital blocks on mixed-signal cellular RF transceiver ASICs, with a focus on IP development and integration. Specified, implemented and integrated the chip-level test and debug infrastructure used by Silicon Validation during bring-up, automated SoC-level power analysis as a weekly script-driven flow, and led the ECO process, resulting in a timely hand-off to physical design, with all fixes integrated.

2017 — 2025

Municipal Councilor / Member of the Linz City Council

City of Linz  ·  Linz

Eight years in elected office, serving on committees spanning economy, innovation, climate, security and health. Concurrently held supervisory board mandates at IKT Linz GmbH and Creative Region Linz & Upper Austria GmbH.

2018 — 2019

Digital Designer (Design for Test)

DMCE — Danube Mobile Communications Engineering (Intel)  ·  Linz

Responsible for MBIST and memory repair of a cellular RF transceiver, from the RTL structure to the production test patterns for the ATE — the first of its RF transceivers with a working memory repair in production. Supported DFT (scan, JTAG/TAP, ATPG) and implemented real-time signal monitoring for debugging.

2014 — 2017

System Engineer (Technical Documentation)

DMCE — Danube Mobile Communications Engineering (Intel)  ·  Linz

Customer and internal product documentation, release management and process automation. Replaced SharePoint with Perforce for configuration uploads, built a wiki-to-FrameMaker exporter, rolled out a wiki-based documentation environment across several RF projects, and supervised working students and trainees.

2010 — 2014

RF System Engineer

DICE via the Research Institute for Integrated Circuits (RIIC)  ·  Linz

Employed by RIIC, working on site at DICE.

Skills

RTL Design

VHDL, SystemVerilog, SystemC; mixed-signal ASIC blocks; AMBA/Wishbone, RISC/ARM; Lint/CDC/RDC; DFT & TnD

Verification

UVM, Formal Verification, logical equivalence checking, STA, TCL-driven regression; Synopsys VCS / Verdi, Cadence Xcelium

EDA & Flows

Synopsys DC / PrimeTime / PrimePower (PTPX) / VCS / Verdi; JasperGold

Coding & Scripting

Python, C, C++, C#, Java, Assembler, MATLAB; Bash, TCL, Make, Perl, SQL, JavaScript, PHP

Artificial Intelligence

LLM Orchestration, Agentic Systems, MCP; Anthropic · Google · OpenAI; Anthropic Academy certified

Toolchain

Git, Emacs, Unix, macOS, SVN, Clearcase, Perforce, LaTeX

Design & Making

Adobe InDesign & Illustrator; Blender, Bambu Studio; Bambu Lab P1S with AMS — multi-material FDM

Leadership

Supervisory board governance (8 yrs); Municipal Councilor (8 yrs); UGL-certified; technical mentoring

Education & Certifications

University Studies  ·  Hagenberg

MSc Embedded Systems Design

University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria  ·  2010

BSc Hardware/Software Systems Engineering

University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria  ·  2008

Other Training

AI For Everyone & Supervised Machine LearningCoursera, Aug 2024
Supervisory Board Certification (UGL)LIMAK, 2018

Beyond the Desk

Kilimanjaro

Africa’s highest peak — summited 18 July 2018

Flying & Gliding

Pilot training for Sailplanes + TMG (EASA); Radiotelephone Operator Certificate for Aeronautical Services; EU Drone Pilot Certificate (A1/A3)

World Traveller

40+ countries across five continents — and counting

Fitness

Jogging, swimming and hiking

DIY Projects

Hands-on builds — hardware and software projects made for the fun of solving a problem myself.

Experimental  ·  AI-Assisted

Country Dashboards

Built on the road with AI assistance — a single-page reference for country data I'd otherwise have to dig up and research from scratch each time I traveled. Data snapshots across the world — geography, climate, population, economy and more.

Get in Touch

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