Electronics & Firmware

This is the discipline that hiring managers most often under-scope. A firmware role and an electronics role look adjacent on an org chart, but the engineers are different, and the ones who genuinely span both are rare enough that a brief asking for both usually needs a conversation before it goes to market.

The work runs from schematic capture and PCB design through to bring-up, bare-metal firmware, and the hardware-software integration that sits between the two. The engineers worth talking to can read a schematic, put a scope on a board, and write the code that talks to it — and they're often the person a team quietly depends on when something doesn't work and nobody can tell whether it's hardware or software.

The commercial reality is that the pool is small and geographically concentrated around the labs. Firms competing for these people on salary alone tend to lose to firms competing on the interest of the product. We spend more time than usual on what the work actually involves, because that's what moves the conversation.