Lead Firmware Engineer

Role Purpose

We are looking for a hands-on Lead Firmware Engineer to lead and grow the embedded hardware and firmware teams. The role owns the technical direction, architecture, engineering quality, and delivery of embedded electronics for industrial drives, servo inverters, frequency inverters, and motion and safety products.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a pure people-management position. The successful candidate will contribute to architecture, design and code reviews, technical problem-solving, and critical debugging while mentoring engineers and aligning teams.

Products: Servo drives, VFDs, motion controllers, and safety drives.

Key interfaces: Controls, Mechanical, System Architecture, Manufacturing, Quality, Cybersecurity, and Functional Safety.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership and Architecture

• Own embedded electronics architecture across MCU/SoC hardware, firmware, and HW–FW interfaces.
• Define technology roadmaps for microcontrollers/SoCs, hardware platforms, firmware frameworks, RTOS, and toolchains.
• Make design decisions that balance performance, cost, reliability, cybersecurity, and manufacturability.
• Serve as the technical escalation point for complex hardware, firmware, and system issues.

Hands-on Engineering

• Participate in hardware architecture, schematic, and PCB layout reviews, including SI/PI and EMC considerations.
• Contribute to firmware architecture discussions, code reviews, and critical module design.
• Support hardware bring-up and prototype debugging, including power, clocks, resets, interfaces, and joint HW–FW debugging with lab tools.
• Guide root-cause analysis of field, EMC, reliability, and performance issues.

Embedded Hardware Leadership

• Guide schematic design for MCU/SoC interfaces, analog frontends, protection, and monitoring.
• Oversee power-supply architecture, component selection, derating, reliability, and lifecycle management.
• Promote robust EMC/EMI-aware design and collaborate with PCB layout, manufacturing, and test teams.
• Oversee electrical, functional, and environmental hardware verification.

Embedded Firmware Leadership

• Lead development of low-level drivers, real-time firmware, bootloaders, firmware updates, and industrial communication stacks.
• Guide secure boot, cryptography, key management, and secure update and rollback strategies.
• Support secure development practices and cybersecurity requirements, including IEC 62443.
• Promote modular, testable, and maintainable software engineering.

Cross-functional System Ownership

• Work with controls engineers, system architects, functional safety, and cybersecurity stakeholders to align requirements, interfaces, and verification.
• Support certifications, audits, and customer escalations as needed.

Team Leadership and Execution

• Mentor and coach hardware and firmware engineers; support hiring, onboarding, and capability development.
• Foster design reviews, knowledge sharing, engineering discipline, and a strong quality mindset.
• Establish structured development, configuration and change management, documentation, and traceability processes.
• Drive verification planning and CI concepts for firmware and hardware verification, and ensure readiness for industrialization and series production.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Computer Engineering, Mechatronics, or a related field.
• 9–12+ years of embedded systems development experience.
• Strong background in embedded firmware and hardware; candidates with greater firmware depth and solid hardware expertise are also considered.
• Hands-on technical leadership experience, such as a recently promoted Technical Manager, System Architect, or Technical Lead managing a team of approximately 4–6 engineers.
• Experience collaborating across teams and communicating with international customers and stakeholders on requirements, design, and delivery.
• Industrial electronics experience preferred, especially servo drives, frequency inverters, motion systems, or power electronics.

Mandatory Technical Skills

• MCU/SoC hardware design, analog and digital circuits, power management, and sequencing.
• PCB design flows, layout reviews, EMC/EMI fundamentals, and hands-on lab debugging.
• Strong embedded C, RTOS or bare-metal development, JTAG/SWD debugging, bootloaders, firmware updates, and industrial communication interfaces.
• Ability to reason across hardware, firmware, timing, power, and system constraints, with strong debugging and root-cause analysis skills.

Desirable Skills

• EtherCAT, CAN, PROFINET, EtherNet/IP, or IO-Link.
• Motor control or drive systems.
• Secure boot, cryptography, IEC 62443, and functional safety exposure (SIL2/SIL3).
• Automated testing, scripting, or CI concepts.

Leadership Expectations

• Technical credibility and the ability to lead through influence.
• Structured, analytical problem-solving and clear communication with technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Proactive ownership, quality orientation, and comfort working in agile, evolving environments.