Sr. Staff Engineer, Embedded Firmware (bare metal)
$180,000 - $223,000 USD yearly
About the role
Ayar Labs is seeking a Sr. Staff Engineer, Embedded Firmware (bare metal) to drive firmware design from inception to customer deployment, ensuring hardware validation and integration. In this role, you will develop embedded firmware for high-speed SerDes interfaces, multi-chip package environments, and electronic/photonic subsystems.
What you'll do
- Design, develop, and optimize bare-metal embedded firmware for controlling high-speed SerDes interfaces and electronic/photonic subsystems.
- Collaborate with analog/mixed-signal, digital, and photonic block designers to develop and implement control algorithms for photonic circuits and establish embedded requirements for multi-chip package systems.
- Write unit tests and integration tests for firmware modules, participate in firmware code reviews, and maintain firmware quality through CI/CD practices.
- Develop and execute firmware test code to support initial silicon power-on and bringup activities, debugging hardware-firmware interactions at first silicon.
- Partner with hardware, validation, systems, and software teams throughout the product development lifecycle.
- Maintain technical documentation including APIs, firmware architecture documents, module specifications, and build/release notes.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's in Electrical/Computer Engineering or a related field with 5+ years of relevant industry experience.
- Proven expertise in bare-metal embedded firmware development, with strong programming skills in C.
- Experience with microcontrollers and firmware debugging tools.
- Silicon bring-up experience.
- Experience in scripting with a high-level language such as Python.
- Experience with Make-based build flows and modern version control workflows (e.g., Git) and CI/CD tools.
Nice to have
- Ability to own architecture and development of firmware modules from scratch.
- Experience in embedded firmware development for high-speed electronics and photonics applications.
- Silicon bring-up experience for high-speed SerDes and photonics applications.
More semiconductor jobs: Firmware engineer jobs · San Jose jobs
This role has been open 9 days — well below the 54-day median for Embedded Firmware Engineering roles.
Embedded Firmware Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
764
|
Median days open
54 d
|
Category median salary (all employers)
$173k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Ayar Labs | All employers we track in this specialty (764 roles · 86 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 9 | 764 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 24 | 6531 · 156 employers |
| Median days open | 95 d | 54 d (+41 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $173k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 110 open roles · median 63 d
- NVIDIA · 80 open roles · median 53 d
- AMD · 56 open roles · median 46 d
- Micron Technology · 50 open roles · median 75 d
- Lattice Semiconductor · 41 open roles · median 59 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 37 open roles · median 34 d
How we counted: 764 open Embedded Firmware Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 86 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 8 Nov 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.