FAE - Principal Field Applications Engineer (Customer Facing/Design-Win Focused)
Originally posted 13 May 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This Principal Field Applications Engineer role requires deep embedded design expertise and extensive customer-facing experience to own embedded solutions from initial customer conversation through production and long-term support. You will serve as a technical lead, architect, and advisor, translating customer requirements into complete hardware and firmware architectures.
What you'll do
- Act as the primary technical interface to customers, leading technical strategy and collaborating with sales to drive design wins to revenue. - Architect end-to-end embedded solutions, including production-level hardware design, schematic capture, component selection, and design for manufacturability. - Develop production-level embedded firmware applications in C/C++ for microcontroller-based systems, including RTOS-based designs, bootloaders, firmware update mechanisms, and peripheral drivers. - Lead system bring-up, hardware and firmware debugging, root-cause analysis, and post-design-win sustaining engineering. - Adapt and extend reference designs to resolve customer-specific technical challenges and roadmap requirements.
What you'll need
- 10+ years in a customer-facing technical role such as Field Applications Engineer, Sales Engineer, Customer Solutions Engineer, or Embedded Systems Consultant. - 10+ years of hands-on embedded system design experience. - Deep expertise in embedded C/C++, microcontrollers, system architecture, RTOS-based firmware development, and serial interfaces (I2C, SPI, UART, USB). - Proven hands-on hardware design experience with schematic capture, component selection, board bring-up, and Git-based workflows. - Proficiency with lab test equipment, including oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and debuggers.
Nice to have
- CI/CD for embedded firmware. - Experience with embedded Linux. - Secure boot and secure firmware update. - Wired or wireless networking experience. - Python for automation or tooling. - Experience supporting products through volume production.
Skills: customer-facing, embedded system architecture, design-wins, firmware applications, board bring-up
This role has been open 124 days — well above the 56-day median for Applications FAE roles.
Applications FAE · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
84
|
Median days open
56 d
|
Median salary
$177k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Microchip Technology | All employers we track in this specialty (84 roles · 23 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 11 | 84 |
| Median days open | 74 d | 56 d (+18 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $177k |
Skills observed across this category: customer-facing, embedded system architecture, design-wins, firmware applications, board bring-up
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 12 open roles · median 86 d
- Keysight Technologies · 11 open roles · median 26 d
- Microchip Technology (this employer) · 11 open roles · median 75 d
- NVIDIA · 11 open roles · median 32 d
- AMD · 8 open roles · median 37 d
- Infineon Technologies · 5 open roles · median 67 d
How we counted: 84 open Applications FAE (Systems Software) roles from 23 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 25 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there. Figures refresh nightly.