#Wireless Software Engineer - Boulder, Colorado, United States of America, United States
$103,000 - $154,600 USD yearly
Originally posted 18 September 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role involves designing, developing, and optimizing real-time embedded software for Qualcomm's modem subsystem (MPSS) across various cellular protocol layers, device drivers, and RTOS-level components. You will contribute to re-imagining how modem software is designed, built, verified, and maintained using an AI-native paradigm.
What you'll do
- Design, implement, and optimize real-time embedded modem software across protocol layers, drivers, and platform services, meeting strict latency, memory, and power constraints.
- Apply data-structure and algorithm design to build efficient, scalable firmware components.
- Own end-to-end feature delivery, including requirements, architecture, implementation, testing, on-target bring-up, and maintenance.
- Pioneer AI-native development practices within the team, integrating AI coding agents and establishing prompt patterns.
- Build and maintain AI-assisted tooling for code review, static analysis, test synthesis, and automated crash/log triage over the modem codebase.
- Debug and root-cause complex, multi-layer issues on target hardware, leveraging AI-assisted analysis of logs, traces, and RAM dumps.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
- Strong command of data structures and algorithms with the ability to reason about time/space complexity in memory- and cycle-constrained environments.
- Deep understanding of operating systems concepts: scheduling, concurrency, interrupts, memory management, IPC, real-time constraints, and RTOS internals (e.g., QuRT, ThreadX, FreeRTOS, or similar).
- Proven programming proficiency in modern C/C++ (C++17 and beyond), including performance optimization, cache-aware design, and lock-free/thread-safe patterns.
- Experience with embedded software on DSP and Arm architectures, including familiarity with SIMD/vectorization, DMA, and low-power design.
- Experience with debugging on target hardware — JTAG, logic analyzers, protocol analyzers, crash-dump / RAM-dump analysis, and log parsing.
- Familiarity with device drivers, HAL layers, boot flows, and hardware/software co-design.
Nice to have
- Experience using AI coding assistants and agentic tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cline, Claude/GPT-based agents) to generate, refactor, and review embedded C/C++ at scale.
- Ability to build and maintain AI-augmented developer workflows: prompt libraries, agent rules, retrieval-augmented context over large firmware codebases, and MCP-style tool integrations.
- Experience applying LLMs to crash triage, log summarization, root-cause analysis, and automated defect classification in complex embedded systems.
- Interest in AI-assisted test generation and verification — synthesizing unit/integration tests, fuzzing harnesses, and coverage-driven test expansion for modem software.
- Experience fine-tuning, prompt-engineering, or building tooling around code models; familiarity with embedding/vector search over source repositories.
Skills: real-time embedded software, modem subsystem, DSP and Arm cores, cellular protocol layers, RTOS-level components
This role has been open 20 days — well below the 58-day median for Embedded Firmware Engineering roles.
Embedded Firmware Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
725
|
Median days open
58 d
|
Median salary
$168k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Qualcomm | All employers we track in this specialty (725 roles · 80 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 127 | 725 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 733 | 6085 · 146 employers |
| Median days open | 59 d | 58 d (+1 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $168k |
Skills observed across this category: real-time embedded software, modem subsystem, DSP and Arm cores, cellular protocol layers, RTOS-level components
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm (this employer) · 127 open roles · median 59 d
- Micron Technology · 61 open roles · median 99 d
- AMD · 59 open roles · median 31 d
- NVIDIA · 57 open roles · median 59 d
- Lattice Semiconductor · 41 open roles · median 30 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 29 open roles · median 78 d
How we counted: 725 open Embedded Firmware Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 80 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 9 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.