Job Description
Firmware Architect
_______________________________________________________________
DEPARTMENT: R&D
REPORTS TO: Vice President of Research & Development
FLSA: Full Time, Exempt (Salary)
Schedule: Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm (Hybrid)
Why You Should Join Us!
- A comprehensive health plan that includes medical, dental, and vision coverage to ensure you and your family have access to the care you need
- A 401(k)-retirement plan with a generous company match to help you save for your future and achieve your financial goals
- Other fringe benefits including Birthday & Anniversary bonus, company-wide discounts, life insurance, Telemedicine access, short & long-term disability, and more!
- Positive work environments that offer work/life balance and professional growth
- Mission-driven work making a global impact with local roots
- The opportunity to have hands on work experience with industry leading, innovative technology
Position Summary
We are seeking a Firmware Architect to serve as a high-impact technical leader within the Engineering team. This role is ideal for an experienced embedded systems professional who combines hands-on firmware development expertise with strong system architecture knowledge, hardware/software integration experience, and cross-functional leadership.
This position sits between Hardware, Firmware, Application Software, Test, and Product Engineering, and will help define firmware architecture, design system and firmware flows, recommend changes to gateways and hardware responses, and guide embedded development efforts toward stable, scalable, production-ready solutions.
The ideal candidate is a strong systems thinker who understands how firmware, hardware, gateways, communication layers, and product requirements intersect. They should also be comfortable using modern AI-assisted development tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, GitHub Copilot, or similar tools to support development, debugging, documentation, test planning, and architectural exploration.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain embedded software and device drivers using C/C++ for production hardware systems.
- Own and guide firmware architecture, including module boundaries, interface contracts, data flows, control flows, communication flows, and design documentation.
- Architect and enhance firmware for real-time systems using RTOS environments, state machines, task scheduling, event-driven design, and timing-aware design patterns.
- Serve as a technical liaison between Hardware, Firmware, Application Software, Test, and Product teams to ensure system-level alignment and reliable integration.
- Recommend changes to gateways, hardware interfaces, firmware behavior, device responses, and system interactions to improve reliability, performance, and maintainability.
- Design and document system flows, firmware workflows, sequence interactions, boot flows, diagnostic flows, fault-handling flows, and recovery flows.
- Lead development of communication interfaces and embedded peripherals, including I2C, SPI, UART, USB, Bluetooth, CAN bus, RS485, cellular, OBD II, GPIO, PWM, ADC, displays, and sensors as applicable.
- Support board bring-up, device driver development, middleware integration, diagnostics, product-level embedded software, and system validation.
- Interpret schematics, datasheets, board-level designs, and hardware specifications to drive low-level software implementation and hardware/software integration decisions.
- Utilize lab equipment, including oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, multimeters, and related tools, to perform advanced debugging, validation, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis.
- Identify architectural improvements, technical debt, performance constraints, integration risks, hardware dependencies, and scalability concerns; proactively propose and implement solutions.
- Provide technical leadership through architecture guidance, design reviews, code reviews, merge reviews, debugging support, quality oversight, and development planning.
- Partner with Test and validation teams to define test strategy, reproduce defects, support environmental testing, evaluate system behavior, and verify product reliability.
- Use AI-assisted development tools responsibly to support coding, debugging, documentation, refactoring, test planning, architecture research, and technical problem-solving.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field required.
- A minimum of 8 years of progressive experience in embedded systems development required.
- Minimum of 2 years of experience leading embedded software architecture, major feature design, platform design, or system-level firmware initiatives strongly preferred.
- Advanced proficiency in embedded C/C++ programming required.
- Strong experience developing firmware within RTOS environments and real-time systems required.
- Demonstrated expertise in hardware/software integration and low-level debugging required.
- Proven ability to independently own firmware components from concept through production required.
- Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and communication skills required.
- Experience working with microcontroller platforms such as Renesas, MSP430, Nordic, or similar preferred.
- Experience implementing communication protocols including I2C, SPI, UART, USB, and Bluetooth preferred.
- Experience with USB and Bluetooth stacks as well as automotive protocols such as OBD II preferred.
- Knowledge of cellular communication technologies such as GSM, LTE, CDMA, and RS485 preferred.
- Familiarity with Agile development methodologies and tools such as JIRA and SVN preferred.
- Exposure to higher-level languages such as Python, Java, or C# for tooling, test automation, or system integration preferred.
- Experience in regulated, safety-sensitive, or hardware-centric product environments preferred.
Physical Demands & Work Environment
The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the functions.
While performing the duties of this position, the employee is regularly required to talk or hear. The employee frequently is required to use hands or fingers to handle, or feel objects, tools or controls. The employee is occasionally required to stand; walk; sit; reach with hands and arms; climb or balance; and stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this position include close vision, distance vision, color vision, peripheral vision, and the ability to adjust focus. The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate.
This job description in no way states or implies that these are the only duties to be performed by the employee(s) incumbent in this position. Employees will be required to follow any other job-related instructions and to perform any other job-related duties requested by any person authorized to give instructions or assignments.
All duties and responsibilities are essential functions and requirements and are subject to possible modification to reasonably accommodate individuals with disabilities. To perform this job successfully, the incumbents will possess the skills aptitudes and abilities to perform each duty proficiently. Some requirements may exclude individuals who pose a direct threat or significant risk to the health or safety of themselves or others.
The requirements listed in this document are the minimum levels of knowledge, skills or abilities. This document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an “at will” relationship.