Lead Embedded Software Engineer

Location: Ealing Area – With Hybrid Working from Home

Salary: Up to £80,000 + Extensive Benefits

KO2’s client is looking for a Lead Embedded Software Engineer to drive the development of robust, scalable embedded software solutions for next‑generation electric products. This role combines hands‑on technical delivery with small‑team leadership, offering the opportunity to influence architecture, mentor engineers, and shape the future direction of embedded platforms.

You will play a key role across the full product lifecycle — from early‑stage prototyping and system design through to production, manufacturing, and long‑term product support — while helping build engineering best practices and delivery capability within the team.

• Lead the design and development of high‑quality embedded software that is efficient, maintainable, scalable, and production‑ready
• Provide technical leadership to a small embedded software team, supporting task planning, technical direction, mentoring, and code reviews
• Collaborate closely with hardware, systems, and manufacturing teams to support board bring‑up, debugging, integration, and system validation
• Own key architectural decisions, helping define software frameworks, coding standards, development processes, and long‑term platform strategy
• Design, implement, test, and maintain embedded software for internally developed electric systems and connected devices
• Investigate and resolve complex real‑time issues relating to timing, performance, reliability, and signal integrity
• Support continuous improvement initiatives across tooling, automation, testing, and development workflows
• Contribute to project planning, technical estimation, risk management, and delivery milestones
• Champion engineering best practices including documentation, version control, CI/CD, and software quality standards

• Strong commercial experience developing embedded software in C and C++
• Proven experience leading or mentoring engineers within a small technical team or project environment
• Strong understanding of embedded systems architecture and full software development lifecycle practices
• Experience developing RTOS‑based applications
• Hands‑on experience with embedded communication protocols such as BLE, CAN, I2C, UART, or SPI
• Comfortable working across hardware/software boundaries, including debugging and system integration
• Experience using version control systems, particularly Git, within collaborative development environments
• A proactive technical problem‑solver with strong analytical and root‑cause investigation skills
• Ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders
• Exposure to functional safety standards such as ISO 13849 or ISO 26262
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern development tooling (e.g. Jenkins, Docker)
• Familiarity with Python for automation, tooling, or test development
• Experience contributing to technical roadmaps, architectural strategy, or platform standardisation

This is an excellent opportunity for a senior embedded engineer ready to step into a lead role — or an existing lead engineer looking for greater technical ownership and influence within an innovative engineering environment developing advanced electric products.