Firmware Engineer - San Jose, United States
Originally posted 19 May 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role owns the accelerator software that turns custom hardware into an inference system, spanning ASIC software, platform firmware, and host-side kernel and drivers. You will work across the stack from first power-on through inference execution.
What you'll do
- Build ASIC software that runs directly on the accelerator, including CPU initialization, RTOS, boot ROMs, bootloaders, MMU, IO drivers, and on-device inference execution. - Translate inference software requests into low-level device operations and scheduling decisions at nanosecond-level timescales for MoE and dense models. - Develop microcontroller and FPGA firmware for power sequencing, board bring-up, telemetry, firmware updates, thermal and power management, and fault recovery. - Build host-side Linux kernel and device drivers covering PCIe, DMA, high-speed peripheral interfaces, memory management, FLR, virtualization/SR-IOV, and low-latency ring-buffer command flows. - Partner with hardware engineers through schematic design, bring-up, validation, and production.
What you'll need
- Strong C/C++ and software engineering fundamentals. - Experience building and debugging low-level software that interacts directly with hardware. - Depth in firmware, embedded systems, device runtimes, operating systems, or kernel/driver development. - Experience shipping software on real hardware into production. - Familiarity with technologies such as ARM, PCIe, DMA, HBM, DRAM, Ethernet, UART, RTOS, or FPGA systems. - Strong systems intuition around performance, concurrency, memory, reliability, and fault handling.
Nice to have
- Hardware bring-up experience on a new chip or board. - Experience with boot ROMs, secure boot, MMUs, RTOS, or CPU initialization. - Experience with PCIe virtualization, FLR, SR-IOV, DMA, ring buffers, or high-speed device communication. - Experience building accelerator runtimes, schedulers, command processors, or other latency-critical execution systems. - Experience using architecture details such as caching, memory hierarchy, or on-chip fabrics to make software decisions at nanosecond-level timescales.
Skills: ASIC firmware, microcontroller firmware, kernel-level interface, host-side kernel and drivers, PCIe, DMA
This role has been open 158 days — well above the 54-day median for Embedded Firmware Engineering roles.
Embedded Firmware Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
765
|
Median days open
54 d
|
Median salary
$169k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Etched | All employers we track in this specialty (765 roles · 84 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 5 | 765 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 42 | 6277 · 144 employers |
| Median days open | 222 d | 54 d (+168 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $169k |
Skills observed across this category: ASIC firmware, microcontroller firmware, kernel-level interface, host-side kernel and drivers, PCIe, DMA
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 126 open roles · median 53 d
- Micron Technology · 65 open roles · median 87 d
- AMD · 63 open roles · median 39 d
- NVIDIA · 58 open roles · median 57 d
- Lattice Semiconductor · 45 open roles · median 44 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 36 open roles · median 31 d
How we counted: 765 open Embedded Firmware Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 84 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 24 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 — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.