Firmware Engineer - Santa Clara, CA, United States
Originally posted 15 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role involves designing, developing, and maintaining embedded firmware that brings up and controls board, switch, and optics hardware, including bootloaders, device drivers, and platform management firmware. You will drive execution across complex, cross-functional programs addressing demanding challenges in AI, wired and wireless communications, and critical infrastructure markets.
What you'll do
- Design, develop, and maintain embedded firmware, boot software, and device drivers for high-speed silicon, memory, interconnect, and power/thermal subsystems.
- Partner with hardware and silicon teams during early hardware bring-up, debugging prototype systems and firmware interactions.
- Develop and maintain platform management controller firmware and remote monitoring and control interfaces.
- Implement control-plane logic and low-level link establishment routines between optical modules and host processing interfaces.
- Design and implement secure firmware update mechanisms, including signed images, verified boot, and remote management APIs.
- Build automated firmware build, test, and release infrastructure, and support manufacturing test integration.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field and 10-15 years of related professional experience; Master's degree and/or PhD with 5-10 years of experience.
- Strong proficiency in C/C++ for embedded firmware and low-level driver development, along with scripting skills in Python or Bash.
- Experience developing low-level boot and platform initialization firmware for embedded systems.
- Solid understanding of high-speed system architecture, signal interfaces, and peripheral communication protocols.
- Hands-on experience with embedded operating systems, low-level drivers, and memory-mapped hardware interfaces.
- Hands-on experience with lab-based debug equipment to isolate firmware and hardware interaction issues.
Nice to have
- Experience with networking silicon platforms.
- Experience with continuous integration (CI/CD) pipelines and automated firmware test infrastructure.
This role has been open 1 day — well below the 56-day median for Embedded Firmware Engineering roles.
Embedded Firmware Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
725
|
Median days open
56 d
|
Median salary
$168k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Marvell Technology | All employers we track in this specialty (725 roles · 83 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 22 | 725 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 72 | 6157 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 44 d | 56 d (−12 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $168k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 119 open roles · median 56 d
- Micron Technology · 61 open roles · median 84 d
- AMD · 60 open roles · median 37 d
- NVIDIA · 60 open roles · median 58 d
- Lattice Semiconductor · 45 open roles · median 37 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 28 open roles · median 40 d
How we counted: 725 open Embedded Firmware Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 83 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 16 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.