Senior Staff Embedded Firmware Engineer
$150,000–$2,200,000 year
On-siteCarlsbad, California, United States or Richmond, British Columbia, Canada
Job Summary
Define and drive the long-term embedded firmware architecture across multiple product families, leading the design of scalable, reusable platforms for next-generation IoT and video streaming devices. Lead cross-functional technical initiatives spanning firmware, hardware, cloud services, mobile applications, manufacturing, and external ODM partners to evaluate new SoCs, chipsets, wireless technologies, and software frameworks. Architect high-performance real-time software for multimedia, networking, and power-efficient systems while establishing engineering best practices for coding standards, testing, and CI/CD. Lead investigation and resolution of complex system-level issues and drive firmware optimization for performance, memory footprint, boot time, and reliability. Mentor engineers across the organization and represent the team in executive technical reviews.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field
- Master's degree preferred, or equivalent industry experience
- 15+ years of embedded firmware development experience, including extensive experience with connected IoT devices and video streaming products
- Demonstrated technical leadership across multiple product generations or embedded software platforms
- Expert-level programming skills in Embedded C and modern C++
- Deep expertise in RTOS, Embedded Linux, and real-time system architecture
- Extensive experience designing complex multimedia systems involving video, audio, image processing, and streaming technologies (H.264/H.265)
- Deep understanding of embedded networking architectures and protocols, including TCP/IP, UDP, RTP, RTSP, SIP, WebRTC, HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, and secure communication
- Expert knowledge of device driver architecture, hardware abstraction layers (HAL), bootloaders, board support packages (BSP), and system bring-up
- Strong understanding of SoC architecture, ARM processors, memory systems, DMA, interrupts, cache management, and power management
- Proven success optimizing embedded software for performance, memory utilization, boot time, reliability, and manufacturing readiness
- Extensive experience debugging complex hardware/software interactions using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, protocol analyzers, and JTAG debuggers
- Extensive experience developing consumer IoT, smart home, security camera, or edge AI products
- Strong experience with Git-based development workflows, automated testing, and continuous integration
- Exceptional communication and technical leadership skills, with demonstrated ability to influence engineering decisions across organizations
- Proven track record of mentoring senior engineers and driving engineering excellence
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with Matter, Thread, Zigbee, Z-Wave, BLE Mesh, and other modern IoT ecosystems
- Expertise in Linux kernel development, memory management, file systems, and system security
- Experience with secure boot, Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), firmware-over-the-air (OTA) updates, TPMs, and hardware security features
- Experience optimizing bootloaders such as U-Boot and platform startup sequences
- Familiarity with scripting and automation using Python, Lua, or similar languages
- Experience leading firmware platform development across multiple product lines
- Experience collaborating with global engineering teams and ODM partners
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