Job Description & Details
This is a solid, hands-on embedded engineering role based out of San Diego, focusing heavily on low-level firmware, real-time operating systems, and secure hardware integration. If you enjoy working close to the metal and collaborating with multi-disciplinary hardware teams in an Agile environment, this gig offers some genuinely interesting technical challenges without the typical Silicon Valley startup chaos.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Expect to spend your days designing, architecting, and debugging firmware for secure embedded systems. You'll be sitting at a lab bench hooking up oscilloscopes and logic analyzers to troubleshoot waveform and signal issues, bridging the gap between digital hardware and high-level software requirements. Much of your time will go toward writing clean C/C++ code, integrating multi-threaded applications, and working alongside systems and hardware engineers within Jira-driven sprints to get complex aerospace or defense-grade hardware communicating reliably.
The Core Tech Stack
C and C++ are non-negotiable here, and you'll need a rock-solid grasp of object-oriented principles applied to constrained environments. Low-level firmware integration, multi-threading, and hardware-software co-design are absolute prerequisites. Experience with static analysis and unit testing tools will keep your code from causing midnight production failures, while familiarity with Xilinx platforms like Zynq, Ultrascale+, or VERSAL, along with protocols like SPI, I2C, UART, PCIe, and Ethernet, will heavily set you apart from other applicants.
Interview Expectations
When you sit down with the technical team, expect them to grill you on how you handle race conditions and memory leaks in multi-threaded embedded systems. They're secretly looking to see if you understand real-time operating system (RTOS) scheduling quirks and how to safely share data between interrupt service routines (ISRs) and application threads without locking up the CPU. You'll likely also be asked to walk through a time you had to debug a stubborn communication bus using lab equipment, where they'll care just as much about your systematic troubleshooting methodology as they do about the final fix.
Application Advice
Your resume needs to scream embedded systems and low-level development from the very first bullet point. Make sure keywords like C/C++, firmware integration, RTOS, multi-threading, and specific protocols like SPI or PCIe are explicitly written out, as the ATS will be scanning for them heavily. Instead of just listing technologies, frame your past experience around constraints, performance optimizations, and hardware debugging wins to prove you actually know how to get software running on physical silicon.