Software Engineer - WLAN

Overview

Company
Qualcomm Atheros, Inc.

Job Area Engineering Group, Engineering Group >
Software Engineering

As a leading technology innovator, Qualcomm pushes the boundaries of what's possible to enable next-generation experiences and drives digital transformation to help create a smarter, connected future for all.

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join the WLAN HAL-PHY firmware team. At this level, you are expected to bring deep, hands-on technical expertise across the full firmware development lifecycle — from architecture through lab bring-up and customer release. You will serve as a technical anchor on the team: setting design direction, driving silicon validation, and elevating the quality of firmware across next-generation WLAN chipsets.

The team has fully adopted AI-assisted development workflows — spanning Claude Code and Git Hub Copilot for firmware generation, MCP-based servers for register lookup and crash triage, and end-to-end AI agent pipelines that span requirements analysis through code review. Candidates should be comfortable using these tools daily and are expected to contribute to their evolution as the team s AI toolchain matures.

• Hands-on technical depth:
  You write production-quality C/C++ firmware daily — this is not a coordination or review-only role.
• Architectural ownership:
  You drive design decisions independently, evaluate trade-offs, and document them for long-term team knowledge.
• Cross-functional influence:
  You collaborate as a peer with chip designers, RF engineers, and hardware board engineers — not just as a consumer of their work.
• Mentorship and code quality:
  You actively raise the bar for junior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, pairing, and constructive feedback.
• Problem ownership:
  You take complex, ambiguous debug problems from initial triage through root cause and verified fix, without needing direction at each step.

This team treats generative AI tools as force multipliers, not optional add-ons. Every engineer — from new hires to staff — is expected to use AI coding assistants, MCP-powered analysis tools, and LLM-based agent workflows as part of their daily development loop. That means generating firmware code with AI, reviewing AI-produced diffs with the same rigor applied to human-authored code, using AI agents to accelerate crash triage and root cause analysis, and contributing improvements to the team s AI toolchain.

Engineers who thrive here are not intimidated by AI-generated output and are not uncritical of it — they know how to direct it, validate it against hardware specs and architecture constraints, and push the quality bar higher over time.

• AI coding assistants — Claude Code, Git Hub Copilot, Cursor for firmware generation, diff review, and HAL-PHY register access iteration
• MCP server tool chains — cscope MCP for symbol navigation, swi-hw-sw MCP for SWI contract verification, Smart Scope and Time Travel for crash dump triage and root cause attribution
• LLMCommittee automated code review — AI-driven multi-model review pipeline for pre-submit quality gating
• AI-assisted SDLC pipelines — req-analysis, sw-sdd, and code-gen agents spanning requirements through implementation
• LLM-based crash triage and regression RCA — FACT-RCA knowledge base, AI-generated hypotheses cross-checked against memory dumps and log data

• Lead software architecture enhancements using established SW design patterns; re-architect existing firmware modules and design new ones from the ground up
• Write, review, and own production-quality low-level firmware in a resource-constrained embedded environment (small memory footprint DSP/ARM processors)
• Develop WLAN offload firmware running on dedicated co-processor cores, independent of the host processor
• Diagnose and resolve complex WLAN and RF system performance issues; analyze power, spectrum, and waveform quality using RF test equipment and IQ capture data
• Design, implement, unit test, and document features for next-generation WLAN platforms (802.11be and beyond)
• Partner with chip designers, hardware board engineers, and RF…