Senior Edge Applications Engineer; Hardware & Embedded Lab Lead

Head Our Edge AI Prototyping Lab. Build Physical Rigs. Deploy TinyML on Silicon. About the Role & The Reality AI Lab

The Renesas AIoT Center of Excellence in Columbia, MD (formerly Reality AI) is seeking a hands‑on Senior Staff Edge AI Applications Engineer to lead our physical Edge AI Applications Lab.

In this role, you will head our physical lab facility, direct R&D and proof‑of‑concept (PoC) hardware builds, manage project scheduling, and mentor junior engineers. You will operate at the exact intersection of small‑scale physical fabrication, digital signal processing (DSP), C/C++ embedded firmware, and microcontroller‑level TinyML deployment.

You will lead the end‑to‑end execution of non‑visual sensing solutions – instrumenting physical hardware setups (industrial motors, automotive systems, consumer devices), collecting high‑frequency time‑series sensor data, building custom DSP pipelines, and optimizing tiny machine learning models to run on Renesas silicon.

Are you a Senior Embedded Engineer or Applied Physicist who thrives in a physical lab environment building custom sensor rigs, soldering prototype boards, and squeezing machine learning models onto microcontrollers?

• This is a physical lab leadership and embedded hardware role.

• Lab Ownership & Technical Leadership: Manage physical lab facilities, equipment, part procurement, and project scheduling for customer PoCs, internal R&D, and cross‑BU hardware integrations.
• Physical Prototyping & Fabrication: Lead hands‑on assembly of prototype rigs, sensor arrays, 3D‑printed mounts, and microelectronic setups to capture real‑world physical data.
• High‑Frequency Sensor Data Engineering: Instrument physical systems to capture, clean, and preprocess high‑frequency time‑series datasets (acoustic, vibration, electrical, motor current).
• DSP & TinyML Deployment: Design DSP feature extraction pipelines (FFTs, spectral analysis, filtering) and deploy optimized, quantized TinyML models onto microcontrollers (ARM Cortex‑M, Renesas RA/RX/RL78) using TFLite Micro, CMSIS‑NN, or eIQ.
• Customer & Cross‑BU
  
  Collaboration:
  
  Work directly with customers and internal product teams to ingest raw hardware telemetry, debug edge firmware issues, and demonstrate live hardware solutions.
• Team Mentorship: Lead, mentor, and guide junior lab engineers in firmware debugging, signal processing, and physical prototype fabrication.

• No SCIF / No Clearance: Enjoy complex signal processing and hardware challenges without defense contractor bureaucracy or classified workspace restrictions.
• Commercial Product Impact: What you build in our lab gets integrated into Renesas silicon and deployed into millions of industrial, automotive, and consumer devices globally.
• Startup Autonomy + Global Backing: Small‑team environment (under 50 people in Columbia) backed by one of the world's premier semiconductor manufacturers.

• Education: M.S. or Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Applied Physics, or a related technical discipline. (BSEE with extensive, demonstrable lab leadership experience will also be evaluated).
• Career
  
  Experience:
  
  7–12+ years of hands‑on experience in embedded software, physical hardware prototyping, digital signal processing, and real‑time edge computing.
• Hardware & Lab
  
  Skills:
  
  Proven expertise in physical system fabrication, 3D printing, electrical assembly, PCB bring‑up, and low‑level debugging with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and JTAG/SWD.
• Embedded Firmware: Strong C/C++ programming for constrained microcontrollers, bare‑metal or RTOS (FreeRTOS, Zephyr), DMA buffer management, and low‑level drivers (SPI, I2C, UART, CAN).
• Signal Processing & On‑Device ML: Deep understanding of digital signal processing (DSP)…