Embedded & Firmware Engineer
Engineers in this role develop and optimize firmware that powers AI infrastructure hardware—from baseboard management controllers in data centers to motor controllers in robotics systems to camera sensor drivers in vision platforms. They work at the boundary between silicon and software, writing low-level C/C++ code to manage power, thermal systems, sensors, and real-time control, often using RTOS environments and debugging with JTAG and oscilloscopes. This work distinguishes itself from higher-level embedded software engineering by its focus on board bring-up, hardware validation, and tight hardware-firmware integration during product bringup. These engineers typically sit in hardware-adjacent teams within AI companies—working closely with silicon teams, hardware engineers, and systems architects to ensure new AI chips and platforms function reliably at scale in production environments.
Measured across 46 of 49 open postings.
This role is advertised at 3 levels, so a single figure for the role would describe none of them. Experience and pay are the midpoints for each level on its own.
| Level | Share | Median years | Median pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid | 43%(20) | 4.5 | — |
| Senior | 30%(14) | 5.5 | — |
| Staff / Principal | 24%(11) | — | — |
A dash means too few postings stated it to report a midpoint. Most companies do not publish a salary band, so pay is indicative rather than a market rate. 1 level with fewer than 10 open postings is not shown.
“Partner with the AI team to support audio-driven inference workloads (wake word, ASR, speech enhancement)”
Requirements are a share of every open posting, so a role missing from this list is one where almost nobody asks. Work mode is different: many postings never say, so that figure counts only the ones that do. A posting stops being advertised when it is filled, cancelled or reorganised, so read the last figure as how long these stay on the market, not as time to hire.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Hardware and embedded systems
Hardware bring-up and debug
Systems performance optimization
Security engineering
Technical issue diagnosis
CI/CD and release automation
Hardware test and validation
Distributed systems architecture
Test automation and quality strategy
Threat modeling and architecture review
Infrastructure automation and IaC
Monitoring and observability
Incident response and reliability
Reliability and failure analysis
Cryptography and key management
Test automation and instrumentation
Robotics systems engineering
AI and GPU infrastructure operations
Technical documentation
Mentoring and code review
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
49 open Embedded & Firmware Engineer jobs across 19 companies.
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