Firmware Engineer II

Microsoft Silicon, Cloud Hardware, and Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) is the team behind Microsoft’s expanding Cloud Infrastructure and responsible for powering Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” mission. SCHIE delivers the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft’s over 200 online businesses including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Teams, OneDrive, and the Microsoft Azure platform globally with our server and data center infrastructure, security and compliance, operations, globalization, and manageability solutions.

About the role

We are seeking an accomplished Firmware Engineer II to join a team of talented engineers in the BIOS/UEFI development team. This team is responsible for delivering robust, high-quality BIOS/UEFI solutions across the entire Microsoft Cloud fleet and managing them throughout their lifecycle. In this role, you will actively collaborate with internal Microsoft teams as well as external partners, including silicon vendors, to ensure our BIOS/UEFI solutions are secure, highly available, and continuously innovative.

At Microsoft, we immensely value culture, mentorship, and act as One Team. This is an opportunity to leverage your technical expertise and grow your existing experience in an innovative and highly collaborative environment where the results of your work will matter to Microsoft and Microsoft’s customers.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to all phases of product development, from design through manufacturing and productization.
• Participate in various server engineering projects by contributing to the architecture and design of firmware components, including driver interfaces, system libraries for SoC bring-up, protocol and feature development of low-level hardware.
• Develop and troubleshoot BIOS/UEFI firmware with experience in SOC bring-up, bootloaders, platform initialization, board support package porting, and peripherals such as PCIe, NVMe, I2C, SPI, USB, UARTs.
• Partner with the Hardware New Program Initiative team and engineering counterparts to oversee the development of new hardware SKUs, ensuring compliance with BIOS/UEFI requirements, adherence to development schedules, comprehensive validation, and successful execution of rollout plans for AI-driven, next-generation compute, and high-memory SKUs.
• Manage requirements and feature delivery through agile execution, including sprints, backlogs, and milestones, while leading continuous planning efforts.
• Define, communicate, and establish vendor-agnostic requirements for innovative hardware solutions powering Azure, engaging actively with internal and external partners such as silicon vendors, ODMs, and OEMs worldwide.

Requirements

• Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 1+ year(s) technical engineering experience OR Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related field AND 2+ years technical engineering experience OR equivalent experience.
• Ability to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements, including passing the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Qualifications

• Preferred Qualifications:
  • 5+ years of professional experience designing and developing BIOS/UEFI firmware solutions.
  • Proficient in developing low-level firmware or software for hardware platforms, including FW, BIOS, UEFI, EDK2, BMC.
  • Proven and demonstrable skill in C programming.
  • Ability to debug and resolve issues spanning multiple subsystems.
  • Advanced problem-solving abilities and strategic thinking, with the capacity to develop and monitor success metrics for designated areas.
• Bonus Qualifications:
  • Experience in Cloud scale problem solving.
  • Understanding of Intel, AMD, or ARM server architecture.
  • UEFI/BIOS development experience as applied to Server Products.
  • Ability to read hardware schematics.
  • Familiar with PCIe, I2C, SPI, USB, and UART buses.
  • Open to new technical challenges and able to deal with ambiguity.

Pay

The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $102,100 - $202,200 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $133,800 - $219,200 per year. Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation.