Manager, Embedded Software Engineering

Location: Antwerp or Amsterdam
Experience: 5+ years in embedded software development, including 2+ years managing embedded or firmware engineers

At Loop, our products are moving beyond passive earplugs into connected and intelligent earwear. Behind every one of them is firmware that has to work flawlessly, from the first board bring-up to the millionth unit off the line and every update after that.

As our Manager, Embedded Software Engineering, you’ll lead the team that makes that happen. You’ll own how firmware gets engineered across Loop’s connected and standalone products, from development and launch through sustaining releases in the field.

This role is for someone who is equally comfortable growing engineers and challenging a firmware design on its merits. You’ll set the standard, build the team, and make sure what we commit to actually ships, on time and at quality.

You’ll lead embedded software across Loop’s product portfolio, owning predictable delivery, engineering quality, and team capability.

You’ll combine technical credibility with people leadership. Product defines what we build, Programme Management defines when it lands, and you define how it’s engineered. Detailed architecture and subsystem design authority stay with our senior engineers, and part of your job is growing them into that technical leadership.

You will line manage the growing team of embedded software engineers directly. While the team is small, you’ll stay hands-on where it matters. As the team grows, you’ll delegate more, while making sure you never become the critical-path dependency.

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of embedded software engineers, setting clear level-referenced expectations and addressing performance early.

• Plan workforce, capacity, tooling, rigs, fixtures, and lab resources to meet commitments, managing priorities and costs within Loop’s approval policy.

• Own firmware delivery across development and sustaining work, including bring-up, manufacturing and test firmware, launch readiness, field issues, security updates, and sustaining releases.

• Ensure clear ownership and acceptance evidence for factory firmware, flashing, provisioning, and version compatibility.

• Estimate and resource work, surface risk early, and own release readiness decisions, including rollout, pause, and rollback.

• Maintain strong engineering standards across coding, review, testing, CI, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), security, and traceability, working within Loop’s Requirements and Risk Management Frameworks.

• Represent embedded software in programme, design, build-readiness, and sustaining forums, owning firmware estimates, dependencies, risks, and readiness judgement.

• Drive cross-system decisions with Engineering, Quality, Industrialisation, suppliers, silicon vendors, and manufacturing partners.

• Lead architecture and design reviews that reach a conclusion on trade-offs, and translate roadmap objectives into clear technical direction.

• Commit to milestones without the resourcing and risk picture to back them up.

• Let a slip surface on the milestone date instead of before it.

• Take design authority away from the senior engineers who own it.

• Become the bottleneck your team has to wait on.

• Treat manufacturing and test firmware as an afterthought.

• Let a field defect sit without a severity, a root cause, and a decision.

• Leave performance conversations for later.

• Stay quiet in a cross-functional forum when firmware has a risk to raise.

You deliver what you commit to. Firmware milestones land within the agreed window, and when something does slip, people hear it from you early. Manufacturing and test firmware is…