Senior Firmware Engineer

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Safety Firmware Engineer to join our Safety Software team within our Functional Safety organization. Your job will be to architect, develop, and maintain safety-critical firmware and embedded software for real-time compute platforms that support Symbotic’s advanced robotics systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop software strategies for real-time ARM-based compute platforms with functional safety requirements.
• Develop, document, and maintain embedded software in C along with Linux and shell scripting solutions using Python, Bash, and related tools.
• Create and maintain C-based unit and integration tests to verify embedded functionality and achieve software quality and test coverage goals.
• Support system testing, integration, and validation activities for components and subsystems.
• Collaborate closely with hardware engineering teams to review schematics and develop software for custom hardware peripherals and interfaces.
• Troubleshoot production and design-related issues through log analysis, debugging, root cause analysis, and board bring-up activities.
• Participate in rigorous code and design review processes to maintain software quality, traceability, and engineering best practices.
• Support functional safety activities including hazard analysis, DFMEA, FMEDA, fault tree analysis, and functional safety reviews.
• Utilize Git and software development processes to ensure maintainable, traceable, and well-documented software development.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or related engineering discipline.
• Minimum of 8 years of professional experience developing real-time embedded software, firmware, or device drivers.
• Strong experience developing embedded software in C within real-time or embedded operating systems environments.
• Deep understanding of RTOS concepts and experience with platforms such as QNX, VxWorks, FreeRTOS, SafeRTOS, or similar.
• Strong knowledge of POSIX systems programming including multithreading, synchronization mechanisms (mutexes, semaphores), shared memory, signals, events, and inter-process communication.
• Experience with low-level communication protocols, networking stacks, and socket implementations including UDP, TCP/IP, and related protocols.
• Strong Linux shell scripting skills, particularly Python and Bash, including experience with parsing, regex, grep, and command-line tooling.
• Experience with software development lifecycle processes, source control, and version control systems such as Git.
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills, including experience working with memory-constrained embedded systems.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with strong documentation practices and the ability to work effectively across matrixed technical teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working in regulated or safety-critical environments such as functional safety, robotics, industrial automation, or medical devices.
• Familiarity with IEC 61508 or other functional safety standards.
• TÜV Functional Safety Engineer (FSE) certification.
• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing and automation.
• Experience integrating vendor SDKs and working with binary communication protocols.
• Experience supporting robotic systems, industrial controls, or autonomous platforms.