Staff Engineer, Platform Firmware
$170,000 - $210,000 USD yearly
Own the board-level and platform-emulation firmware used to enable, validate, and demonstrate Ayar Labs’ electro-photonic products.
About the role
This role involves owning the board-level and platform-emulation firmware used to enable, validate, and demonstrate Ayar Labs’ electro-photonic products. This position focuses on firmware running on STM32-based boards that emulate customer platforms, control external hardware, and validate embedded firmware running inside Ayar Labs’ and customers’ SoCs.
What you'll do
- Own and evolve platform-level firmware running on STM32-based systems used for demos, validation, and customer enablement.
- Develop firmware that controls and monitors ADCs, DACs, regulators, and laser modules.
- Build and maintain firmware that emulates customer platforms, enabling realistic system behavior without requiring full customer SoCs.
- Lead board bring-up and sign-off, working hands-on in the lab to validate functionality and readiness.
- Review schematics and PCB designs, providing feedback to the hardware team when changes materially improve firmware robustness, testability, or system reliability.
- Develop board-level firmware that controls, exercises, and tests embedded firmware running inside Ayar Labs’ and customers’ SoCs.
What you'll need
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field, with 4+ years of platform firmware experience.
- Strong experience with bare-metal platform firmware development in C.
- Hands-on experience with STM32 microcontrollers (or similar ARM-based MCUs).
- Proven experience with board bring-up, lab debugging, and hardware/firmware integration.
- Ability to review schematics and board designs and collaborate with hardware teams.
- Experience supporting multiple hardware platforms within a shared firmware architecture.
- Proficiency with Git-based development workflows.
Nice to have
- Experience controlling power, analog, or optical subsystems (ADCs, DACs, regulators, lasers).
- Familiarity with CMIS or related optical module management protocols.
- Experience developing test, diagnostic, or platform-emulation firmware.
- Exposure to customer SoC platforms, boot flows, or system bring-up.
- Experience with Make-based build systems and Python-based tooling.
- Background in high-speed SerDes or photonics-adjacent systems.
More semiconductor jobs: Firmware engineer jobs · San Jose jobs
This role has been open 22 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.