About This Role
This engineering role involves designing, developing, and maintaining embedded firmware for next-generation platform solutions, supporting board, switch, and optics development. The Firmware Engineer will drive execution across complex, cross-functional programs addressing challenges in AI, wired and wireless communications, and critical infrastructure markets. This position partners closely with hardware design, ASIC, signal/power integrity, and validation teams to ensure robust, secure, and production-ready firmware across the full platform lifecycle.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain embedded firmware, boot software, and device drivers for high-speed silicon, memory, interconnect, and power/thermal subsystems across networking platform hardware
- Partner with hardware and silicon teams during early hardware bring-up, debugging prototype systems and firmware interactions
- Develop and maintain platform management controller firmware and remote monitoring and control interfaces
- Implement control-plane logic and low-level link establishment routines between optical modules and host processing interfaces to ensure reliable, repeatable high-speed connectivity
- Design low-level communication interfaces for pluggable modules and board controllers, and implement firmware memory architecture, access controls, and firmware-updatable power sequencing
- Design and implement secure firmware update mechanisms - including signed images, verified boot, and remote management APIs - with recovery and independent updatability across platform firmware components, meeting industry security assurance standards
- Develop embedded telemetry firmware to collect high-frequency system metrics and stream data to host memory with minimal impact on performance, delivered through standard software upgrade mechanisms
- Build automated firmware build, test, and release infrastructure, and support manufacturing test integration with production-ready images
- Work closely with hardware, silicon, validation, and systems software teams to define firmware requirements and interfaces, and deliver supporting technical documentation
- Proactively identify firmware and platform integration risks, develop mitigation strategies, and escalate issues as needed to drive resolution
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field and 10-15 years of related professional experience; Master's degree and/or PhD in a related technical field with 5-10 years of experience
- Strong proficiency in C/C++ for embedded firmware and low-level driver development, along with scripting skills in Python or Bash for automation
- Experience developing low-level boot and platform initialization firmware for embedded systems
- Solid understanding of high-speed system architecture, signal interfaces, and peripheral communication protocols
