Senior Firmware Engineer

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The Senior Firmware Engineer is responsible for designing, developing, verifying, and maintaining embedded firmware for advanced scientific imaging and automation instruments. The role supports shared and complementary embedded technologies across the imaging instrument platforms, including real-time control, precision motion, imaging hardware, communications, firmware updates, environmental control, diagnostics, and multi-board integration. This position reports to the Software Engineering Manager and is part of the Engineering team located in San Jose, California.

This is an on-site role supporting hands-on instrument development and integration.

• Design and deliver production embedded firmware in C and modern C++ for STM
  32-based controllers, creating maintainable architectures for multi-board scientific instruments and board-specific applications.
• Lead hardware bring-up, subsystem integration, and performance optimization across motion, imaging, illumination, sensing, temperature control, and other instrument functions in partnership with electrical, mechanical, systems, test, application software, and manufacturing teams.
• Develop and troubleshoot real-time FreeRTOS and CMSIS-RTOS applications, including task scheduling, synchronization, queues, notifications, timers, interrupts, DMA, memory usage, and fault recovery.
• Implement reliable device communication and update capabilities, including peripheral drivers, framed host-device protocols, CRC-protected messaging, Ethernet/TCP services, embedded networking, bootloaders, flash programming, image verification, and persistent configuration.
• Strengthen product quality and technical execution by building unit, integration, hardware-assisted, and hardware-in-the-loop tests; maintaining build and continuous-integration workflows; leading design and code reviews; documenting interfaces and decisions; mentoring engineers; and driving root-cause analysis of regressions and field issues.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years of professional embedded firmware development experience, including ownership of production systems through development, integration, release, and maintenance.
• Expert proficiency in embedded C and strong proficiency in modern C++ for resource-constrained microcontrollers, with practical experience on STM
  32 or comparable Arm Cortex-M platforms.
• Hands-on experience developing RTOS-based and non-RTOS embedded systems, including…