Firmware Engineer, Staff

Description

WORK LOCATION:

Ann Arbor, MI

FLSA STATUS:
Exempt

SALARY RANGE:
The anticipated salary range for this role is $134,000 to $175,500 annually. This range reflects a good faith estimate based on the targeted level for the role and typical compensation benchmarks across U.S. locations. Actual compensation may vary depending on the selected candidate’s qualifications, experience, geographical location, and internal alignment.

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Firmware Engineer to join our innovative team. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in greenfield/brownfield bare metal firmware development for complex systems such as batteries, fuel cells, UAVs, complex consumer electronics, or automobiles. This role requires a deep understanding of firmware development principles, hardware integration principles, excellent problem-solving skills and tenacity, and the ability to champion projects from concept through completion.

As a Staff Firmware Engineer in the Energy Systems group in Ann Arbor, you will play a critical role in developing firmware for our cutting-edge power systems products. You will engage in the entire firmware development lifecycle, from requirements gathering and analysis to design, implementation, and testing. Your expertise will be essential in creating robust and reliable firmware that ensures the optimal performance of our systems.

The following job functions are a basic requirement but are not limited to and may be assigned other duties.

• Lead and champion the development of embedded firmware features for power systems products, ensuring reliability, safety, and maintainability.
• Own subsystem-level firmware architecture, including bootloaders, interrupt architecture, and communication driver development.
• Perform board bring-up on new hardware, validating digital/analog interfaces, timing, power sequencing, and hardware interactions.
• Lead integration of sensors, peripheral devices, HMIs, power systems, and control interfaces into the product architecture.
• Develop and optimize communication layers (CAN, SPI, UART, I2C) for robustness under operational constraints.
• Develop test plans and conduct rigorous testing to validate firmware performance and compliance with industry standards and perform Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL), System Integration Lab (SIL), and bench validation activities.
• Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, architecture discussions, and technical coaching.
• Serve as a technical interface to cross-functional leads, participating in design reviews and requirement decomposition.
• Work closely with other engineering disciplines to ensure cohesive and integrated system designs.
• Identify and implement innovative solutions to enhance system functionality and performance.
• Prepare and maintain detailed documentation for firmware designs, test procedures, and user manuals.

• 7+ years of professional experience developing embedded firmware in safety-critical or mission-critical environments.
• BS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering or related field is required
• Demonstrated ability to develop, implement, and test greenfield/brownfield firmware.
• Experience driving system integration across hardware, firmware, and software layers.
• Expert-level proficiency in C/C++ for embedded systems.
• Extensive experience developing firmware for ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers (STM
  32, TM4C, etc.) and Digital Signal Processors (TMS
  320, etc.), including startup code, interrupt handling, peripheral configuration and memory management.
• Proven experience with a deep understanding of communication protocols (UART, SPI, I²C, CAN, Ethernet).
• Strong experience with bare metal software architecture and development.
• Demonstrated experience developing bootloaders, application firmware, and communication driver development for ARM-based microcontrollers.
• Expert-level experience working with IDEs (such as Code Composer Studio), build configurations, and debugging build errors and warnings.
• Ability to read schematics, understand PCB layout implications, and collaborate closely with electrical engineering.
• Able to effectively communicate…