Senior Embedded Software Engineer

Senior Embedded Software Engineer (Zephyr RTOS)

Cambridge | Hybrid Work from Home

If Zephyr RTOS is your bread and butter, and I mean properly your bread and butter rather than something you once dabbled with on a dev kit over a wet weekend, then I would very much like to hear from you.

A client of KO2’s, a genuinely expanding engineering business, is looking to bring a Senior Embedded Software Engineer into its Cambridge software team. In an economic climate where a fair few companies are battening down the hatches, this lot are firmly in the minority: they are investing, recruiting and building, and the sector they operate in is one of the few that is demonstrably on the up. That is not marketing puff on my part; it is simply the reality of where they sit.

Zephyr: the non negotiable bit

Let me be unequivocal, because there is no point dressing it up: commercial Zephyr experience is the sine qua non of this role. Not FreeRTOS with a passing curiosity about Zephyr, not ‘I’ve read the documentation’, but genuine hands on experience architecting, developing and maintaining production firmware on Zephyr. You will be comfortable with devicetree, Kconfig, the driver model, west and the general philosophy of how Zephyr wants a system put together. If you have contributed upstream, or wrestled a Zephyr port onto awkward custom silicon and won, so much the better.

What you’ll be getting stuck into

• Architecting and developing embedded firmware on Zephyr RTOS, with some bare metal work alongside it
• Bringing up prototype boards from first power, armed with a debugger, a scope and a logic analyser
• Designing and maintaining board to board and digital interfaces: CAN, SPI, I²C, UART and RS422
• Building networked services and interfaces including REST APIs, SNMP agents and OpenAPI specifications
• Developing and debugging TCP and UDP communication layers, and getting into the weeds on protocol performance
• Secure communications: authentication, encryption, secure firmware update and system hardening
• Embedded Linux work on Yocto based platforms, including services, daemons, device drivers and middleware
• Leading root cause analysis when things go awry, and writing requirements, interface specs and documentation that people will actually read
• Working shoulder to shoulder with hardware and systems engineers to make sure data and control interfaces are rock solid

What you’ll bring

• Substantial commercial experience of low level embedded software and firmware
• Strong, demonstrable Zephyr RTOS experience (I cannot overstate this one)
• Solid C and C++, with a knack for squeezing performance out of resource constrained hardware
• Confidence reading schematics and datasheets
• Proven board bring up and hardware to software integration experience
• Practical debugging chops with scopes, logic analysers and software debug tools
• The ability to explain what you’ve done, clearly, both on paper and in person

The non essentials are: ARM Cortex M and Cortex A (STM32 in particular), Yocto or similar Linux build systems, Linux kernel internals, bootloaders and systemd, TLS, SSH, IPSec and HTTPS, secure boot, Python, MISRA C or C++, CI/CD and automated test, Docker or Kubernetes, and the steady hand needed to tack a fly lead onto a board for probing.

The package, and why it’s worth more than the headline figure

The money: £80,000 to £85,000 basic, which sits firmly at the upper end of what the market pays for this calibre of engineer.

Your time: a 37.5 hour week, hybrid working, and 25 days’ annual leave on top of bank holidays, with the option to buy five more if you fancy a longer summer.

Your future: a pension with the employer putting in as much as 8%, a share save scheme so you can own a slice of the business you’re helping to grow, and a proper commitment to training and development.

Looking after you: life assurance and income protection, so you and yours are covered should the worst happen.

The extras: an electric vehicle scheme, cycle to work, and a paid volunteering day each year.

Getting you here: visa sponsorship is available for the right person, and there is a relocation package to take the sting out of the move.

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