Firmware Engineer
- $220,000 - $275,000
- San Jose, CA
- Permanent
Firmware Engineer
Location: Mountain View, CA
Industry: AI Hardware / Accelerators
About the Role
A fast-growing AI hardware company is looking for a Firmware Engineer to own the platform firmware that brings next-generation AI accelerator systems to life and keeps them secure, healthy, and observable.
You’ll work across the firmware stack—from secure boot and hardware root of trust through embedded controllers/BMC and device firmware, as well as power management, telemetry, and the debug infrastructure required to operate accelerator platforms at scale.
What You’ll Do
- Develop platform firmware across the stack, including boot ROM/bootloaders, embedded controllers/BMC, and device firmware for accelerator silicon and systems.
- Build secure boot and hardware root-of-trust functionality, including measured/verified boot, code signing, chain-of-trust, authenticated firmware updates, anti-rollback protections, and secure debug.
- Develop power-management firmware covering power sequencing, PMIC/voltage-rail control, DVFS, and thermal/power protection and budgeting.
- Build monitoring and telemetry infrastructure for sensors, system health, RAS, error logging, and platform-management/observability interfaces.
- Support board and post-silicon bring-up using JTAG, scan, and other hardware-debug infrastructure.
- Partner closely with silicon architecture, hardware/board, and software teams on firmware interfaces, threat modeling, and HW/SW co-design.
- Leverage modern development and assisted tooling to accelerate firmware development and code review.
What We’re Looking For
- Strong C and assembly programming skills for embedded or firmware development.
- Experience with bare-metal or RTOS environments on ARM or similar architectures.
- 5+ years of platform/system firmware development experience spanning areas such as boot, BMC/embedded controllers, and device firmware.
- Hands-on experience with secure boot, hardware root of trust, code signing, and secure/anti-rollback firmware updates.
- Experience developing power-management firmware, including power sequencing, PMICs/voltage regulators, DVFS, and thermal/power telemetry.
- Experience with platform monitoring and debugging, including sensors/telemetry, RAS/error handling, JTAG/debug, and management interfaces.
- Comfortable operating at the hardware/software boundary, including reading hardware datasheets and specifications, performing lab bring-up, and using equipment such as oscilloscopes and logic analyzers.
Nice to Have
- Rust for firmware or embedded development.
- OpenBMC, UEFI, or coreboot.
- Accelerator, GPU, or server-platform firmware experience.
- Applied cryptography and key-management experience.
- Trusted Execution Environments such as ARM TrustZone.
- Familiarity with side-channel or fault-injection security concerns.
- Experience with standards such as NIST SP 800-193 or FIPS 140-3.
- Familiarity with SBOM and firmware supply-chain security.
Keywords: Platform Firmware, Embedded Firmware, System Firmware, BMC, OpenBMC, Secure Boot, Root of Trust, Bootloader, ARM, Bare Metal, RTOS, C, C++, Assembly, Power Sequencing, PMIC, DVFS, Telemetry, RAS, JTAG, Board Bring-Up, Post-Silicon, Hardware Debug, Firmware Debug, UEFI, coreboot, Redfish, IPMI, TrustZone, AI Accelerators, GPU Firmware, Server Firmware.