Sr. Staff Embedded Applications Engineer, TinyML Lab - Columbia, United States
$139,500 - $185,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 29 September 2026 by the employer.
Lead the Edge AI Prototyping Lab, building physical rigs and deploying TinyML on Renesas silicon.
About the role
As a Senior Staff Embedded Applications Engineer, you will lead the physical Edge AI Applications Lab at the Renesas AIoT Center of Excellence.
What you'll do
- Manage physical lab facilities, equipment, part procurement, and project scheduling for customer PoCs, internal R&D, and cross-BU hardware integrations.
- Lead hands-on assembly of prototype rigs, sensor arrays, 3D-printed mounts, and microelectronic setups to capture real-world physical data.
- Instrument physical systems to capture, clean, and preprocess high-frequency time-series datasets (acoustic, vibration, electrical, motor current).
- Design DSP feature extraction pipelines (FFTs, spectral analysis, filtering) and deploy optimized, quantized TinyML models onto microcontrollers.
- Work directly with customers and internal product teams to ingest raw hardware telemetry, debug edge firmware issues, and demonstrate live hardware solutions.
- Lead, mentor, and guide junior lab engineers in firmware debugging, signal processing, and physical prototype fabrication.
What you'll need
- M.S. or Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Applied Physics, or a related technical discipline.
- 7–12+ years of hands-on experience in embedded software, physical hardware prototyping, digital signal processing, and real-time edge computing.
- Expertise in physical system fabrication, 3D printing, electrical assembly, PCB bring-up, and low-level debugging with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and JTAG/SWD.
- Strong C/C++ programming for constrained microcontrollers, bare-metal or RTOS (FreeRTOS, Zephyr), DMA buffer management, and low-level drivers (SPI, I2C, UART, CAN).
- Deep understanding of digital signal processing (DSP) for time-series/audio data and practical experience deploying quantized ML models directly onto microcontrollers.
Skills: embedded C/C++, TinyML, microcontrollers, DSP, physical prototyping, lab leadership
This role has been open 16 days — well below the 49-day median for Embedded Firmware Engineering roles.
Embedded Firmware Engineering · Mixed Signal DSP
|
Open roles in category
26
|
Median days open
49 d
|
Median salary
—
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See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Renesas Electronics | All employers we track in this specialty (26 roles · 13 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 2 | 26 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 125 | 6156 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 66 d | 49 d (+17 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | — |
Skills observed across this category: embedded C/C++, TinyML, microcontrollers, DSP, physical prototyping, lab leadership
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 8 open roles · median 26 d
- Silicon Labs · 4 open roles · median 30 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 3 open roles · median 30 d
- Renesas Electronics (this employer) · 2 open roles · median 66 d
- Ambiq Micro · 1 open role · median 85 d
- Cadence Design Systems · 1 open role · median 205 d
How we counted: 26 open Embedded Firmware Engineering (Mixed Signal DSP) roles from 13 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.