Job Description & Details
This is a short, two-month hands-on gig focused entirely on validating firmware for IoT-enabled cold chain logistics hardware used in the healthcare and pharma space. You will be knee-deep in physical devices, running manual regression passes, capturing serial logs, and verifying GPS and power states before units ship out.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Expect to spend your days in the lab interacting directly with physical hardware rather than writing endless automated test suites. You'll execute structured test passes—smoke, regression, and targeted suites—checking everything from battery charging cycles and fault recovery to GNSS time-to-first-fix and signal dropouts. When a device behaves badly, it's on you to dig into the serial logs, isolate whether it's a firmware or hardware failure, and reproduce it reliably so the engineers can patch it.
The Core Tech Stack
You need a solid grasp of embedded firmware validation concepts and physical hardware testing methodologies. While you aren't building an enterprise automation framework from scratch, knowing your way around Python or shell scripting for quick, pragmatic tooling to speed up repetitive sanity checks will save you hours. Deep familiarity with tracking down flaky connectivity behaviors, sensor integrations, and power management states on resource-constrained devices is mandatory here.
Interview Expectations
They are going to ask you how you approach testing a GPS module in a basement or low-signal fringe area, so be prepared to walk through your methodology for checking time-to-first-fix and graceful degradation under poor signal conditions. They also want to see how you handle triage when a device bricks during a pre-deployment ship test; the interviewer is secretly testing your systematic debugging process and how calmly you isolate variables between bootloaders, application firmware, and hardware faults.
Application Advice
Your resume needs to heavily feature concrete examples of physical hardware testing, IoT device validation, and hands-on debugging using serial logs and lab equipment. Make sure keywords like firmware validation, regression testing, serial logs, GPS/GNSS testing, and Python scripting are prominent to clear the ATS, but frame your bullet points around shipped reliability and risk mitigation rather than just listing test cases executed.