#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 — open 2 days.
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 1 day — well below the 59-day median for Embedded Firmware Engineering roles.
Embedded Firmware Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
715
|
Median days open
59 d
|
Median salary
$173k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Qualcomm | All employers we track in this specialty (715 roles · 75 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 123 | 715 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 718 | 5787 · 143 employers |
| Median days open | 59 d | 59 d (same as this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $173k |
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) · 123 open roles · median 59 d
- Micron Technology · 62 open roles · median 67 d
- NVIDIA · 58 open roles · median 48 d
- AMD · 48 open roles · median 30 d
- Lattice Semiconductor · 47 open roles · median 12 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 33 open roles · median 60 d
How we counted: 715 open Embedded Firmware Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 75 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 20 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.