Staff Embedded Software Test Engineer - Austin, Texas, United States
Originally posted 2 September 2026 by the employer — open 7 days.
About the role
This Staff Embedded Software Test Engineer will act as a hands-on technical lead, ensuring embedded firmware and software products are thoroughly tested.
What you'll do
- Provide technical expertise for testing embedded firmware throughout the product cycle.
- Design comprehensive test strategies for embedded firmware projects, including black-box, white-box, stress, long-duration, integration, and system testing.
- Develop automation plans to increase test efficiency, coverage, and repeatability.
- Implement tests during both pre-silicon and post-silicon phases of embedded firmware development.
- Find, triage, and debug issues in collaboration with embedded software, firmware, hardware, and systems teams.
- Present test results, coverage, risks, and defect findings to product owners, internal customers, and software developers.
What you'll need
- BS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or Computer Engineering with a minimum of 8 years of experience, or MS with a minimum of 6 years of experience.
- Strong knowledge of embedded systems, embedded firmware, and Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS).
- Experience with a variety of MCU and DSP cores/processors and their software stacks.
- Proficiency with Python, shell, C, and C++.
- Hands-on experience developing reusable embedded test frameworks, test utilities, and hardware-in-the-loop test infrastructure.
- Knowledge and hands-on experience in embedded hardware or firmware system testing sufficient to design and execute test strategies, develop test plans, identify defects, and assess system-level functionality and reliability.
- Knowledge of requirements analysis and test case development, including interpreting technical requirements, deriving comprehensive test scenarios, and documenting traceable test cases with clear expected results.
- Experience automating functional, regression, integration, and system-level tests for embedded hardware or firmware, and analyzing automated test results.
- Ability to debug embedded hardware or firmware using logs, traces, debuggers, instrumentation, and systematic root-cause analysis.
- Experience using lab equipment such as oscilloscopes, signal generators, logic analyzers, and spectrum analyzers for measurement and debugging of embedded systems.
Nice to have
- Experience with Jira, SVN/Git, and continuous integration systems such as Jenkins.
- Familiarity with defect management practices.
- Familiarity with the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
- Experience with Agile Scrum software development.
- Experience developing and implementing embedded software and firmware tests on development boards.
- Experience validating embedded firmware across hardware, software, and system-level interfaces.
Skills: embedded firmware, RTOS, MCU, DSP, test frameworks
This role has been open 7 days — well below the 49-day median for Embedded Firmware Engineering roles.
Embedded Firmware Engineering · Mixed Signal DSP
|
Open roles in category
25
|
Median days open
49 d
|
Median salary
—
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Cirrus Logic | All employers we track in this specialty (25 roles · 12 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 2 | 25 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 13 | 5650 · 142 employers |
| Median days open | 35 d | 49 d (−14 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | — |
Skills observed across this category: embedded firmware, RTOS, MCU, DSP, test frameworks
Who's hiring in this category
- Renesas Electronics · 6 open roles · median 21 d
- Qualcomm · 4 open roles · median 76 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 3 open roles · median 3 d
- Ambiq Micro · 2 open roles · median 49 d
- Cirrus Logic (this employer) · 2 open roles · median 35 d
- Silicon Labs · 2 open roles · median 30 d
How we counted: 25 open Embedded Firmware Engineering (Mixed Signal DSP) roles from 12 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 10 Sept 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.