Principal Embedded Software Engineer

About the role

You will join a diversified technology company that ships embedded platforms across industrial, medical, and automotive product lines. As a principal engineer, you are the company-wide authority on embedded software: the person product teams call when architectures collide with physics. This role matters because platform decisions made at this level compound across a decade of products, and getting them right determines whether the company builds on a common foundation or re-learns the same lessons in every division.

What you will achieve

• Define the company's embedded software platform strategy, consolidating three divergent firmware codebases onto one shared HAL and build system within 18 months while no product line misses a release
• Drive adoption of a unified OTA and device lifecycle framework across five product lines, cutting fleet-wide update rollouts from weeks to days and update-related support cases by 60%
• Reduce platform bring-up cost by publishing reference architectures for ARM and RISC-V targets that new teams adopt with under two weeks of integration effort, measured across three onboardings
• Lead technical due diligence on MCU and SoC vendor selection for a three-year roadmap, running evaluations that save six figures in NRE and lock in second-source options for every strategic part
• Build the embedded engineering ladder and mentoring program, growing the bench from 15 to 40 engineers while holding the hiring bar steady as measured by first-year performance ratings

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 12+ years in embedded software with a history of org-level architectural decisions that shipped in volume and survived multiple product generations
• Expert-level C/C++ across bare-metal, RTOS, and Linux-based embedded targets, with the judgment to choose the right layer for each problem
• Demonstrated ability to unify platforms: HAL design, build systems, and CI for firmware across heterogeneous targets with competing team priorities
• Fluency in security architecture for connected devices, including secure boot, key provisioning, and update integrity from factory to field
• Experience working with hardware teams on SoC selection, pin planning, and power architecture tradeoffs during the earliest phases of a program
• A record of mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction without direct authority, through writing, reviews, and working prototypes
• Published or presented technical work such as conference talks, standards contributions, or deep open-source involvement that the industry recognizes

Nice-to-haves

• Experience across regulated domains (medical, automotive, aerospace) and their documentation and process expectations
• Familiarity with formal methods or model-based design applied to firmware where the cost of failure justifies the rigor
• Prior principal or fellow-level scope at a comparable engineering organization with multi-division influence