What is an Embedded Software Engineer?

An embedded software engineer writes the code that controls a device that is not a general-purpose computer: an automotive braking system, a pacemaker, a smart appliance, a home battery, a sensor. The hardest moment in the work comes at the bench, when new hardware first powers on and you work out, in the words of Samsara’s firmware posting, “whether the bug is in your code, a library, the schematic, or the part itself.”

The code is usually C, and it runs on a small processor inside the product. Employers hire on proof that your code has run on real hardware: a board you brought up, a driver you wrote for a specific bus such as I2C, a bug you tracked down with an oscilloscope.

What six live postings ask for. Six US postings open on November 3, 2026: one early-career, one senior, and four mid-level or with no level stated. The full list is in What hardware experience each posting asks for.

The posted base pay for the three mid-level roles that show a range runs from $113,645 to $220,000. Salary sites report a wider spread, and the salary section explains why. To get in, see how to become one.

What Does an Embedded Software Engineer Do?

The job is to write, test and maintain the software inside a product, close to the chips it controls. The University of Washington’s continuing education school puts the difference this way: “unlike, say, application software developers, embedded software engineers need to understand the mechanics of the hardware and how the software and hardware should interact.”

What the work looks like

The six postings in this guide describe a mix like this:

• Drivers. Code that talks to sensors, motors, radios and other chips over buses such as SPI, I2C, UART, CAN and USB. Lexington Medical asks for drivers for “SPI, I2C, CAN, UART, and USB.”
• Real-time tasks or bare metal. A real-time operating system (RTOS) such as FreeRTOS or Zephyr schedules tasks with timing deadlines. Bare-metal code runs on the chip with no operating system.
• Bootloaders and updates. Nuro lists bootloaders, Samsara lists secure boot and over-the-air (OTA) updates, and Base Power lists firmware updates over CAN.
• Board bring-up. Getting new hardware to run for the first time, next to the electrical engineer who designed it. Every posting but Lucid’s lists bring-up.
• Bench debugging. Working out at the bench why the board does not do what the code says. Nuro’s posting says: “You enjoy finding out why hardware and software disagree.”
• Tests on hardware. Nuro names “hardware-in-the-loop benches,” and Base Power’s role uses hardware-in-the-loop testing and crash dumps.
• Safety and process documentation. Nuro names the ISO 26262 process, Lexington Medical lists IEC 62304 and FDA design controls as a plus, and Anduril prefers experience with requirements tools such as Jama or DOORS.

Lawrence Lo, an advisory board member for the UW program, says: “If you don’t do it right, you might hurt someone.”

Industries and the standards they bring

The industry you work in decides which safety standard your code and your paperwork must follow. In the Eclipse Foundation’s 2024 IoT and Embedded Developer Survey, “Nearly half (47%) of developers prioritise safety certifications such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262.”

Some teams also follow MISRA C, a set of coding guidelines for C. The current edition is MISRA C:2025.

You do not need to know these standards before your first job, but check which one a posting names.

Embedded software engineer vs firmware engineer vs software engineer

The roles share C and many tools. They differ in how close to the hardware the work sits.

Yoh, a staffing firm, draws the line in an April 9, 2025 post: embedded software engineers’ “day-to-day tends to focus more on higher-level functionality, often using real-time operating systems and application-layer programming,” while firmware engineers’ “focus is on the lowest layer of code.” The same post adds that “some job postings use the terms interchangeably.”

The postings agree. Anduril’s “Embedded Firmware Engineer” and Samsara’s “Firmware Engineer” ask for the same C, RTOS and bus skills as Nuro’s and Lexington Medical’s “Embedded Software Engineer.” Search both titles and read the duties.

How to Become an Embedded Software Engineer

The usual route in is a degree in computer science, computer engineering or electrical engineering, plus hands-on hardware work from an internship, a co-op or projects on a real board.

Degrees the postings ask for

UW’s guide says embedded software engineers “typically have a degree in computer science, computer engineering or electrical engineering.” The postings match:

• Lexington Medical, Nuro and Anduril name those same three degrees. Lexington Medical also accepts robotics or “a related discipline,” Nuro “a closely related field” and Anduril “equivalent industry experience.”
• Lucid Motors is the narrowest: “Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering or related technical field(s) is required.”
• Base Power and Samsara do not state a degree.

The entry picture

Entry-level embedded jobs exist, but they ask for embedded work you have already done.

• Lexington Medical’s posting says: “This is an early-career role for an engineer who has already done real embedded work in an internship or co-op.” It asks for “One or more years of relevant experience, including internships or co-ops with substantial hands-on embedded or hardware-focused work.”
• Anduril’s 2027 Early Career Firmware Engineer posting, a seventh posting that is not counted in this guide’s six, is for people who “Must be pursuing or have recently completed a bachelor’s or master’s degree” and posts a pay range of $112,000 to $149,000.
• Formlabs lists an “Embedded Software Engineer - Entry Level” role in Boston on its job board.

Junior roles are harder to find across tech in general. Indeed’s 2025 Tech Talent Report found that “Postings for senior and manager-level tech jobs were still closer to their pre-pandemic levels (down 19%)” while a chart in the report puts postings for standard and junior tech titles at down 34%. That covers all tech postings, not embedded roles alone.

If you are changing careers from other software work, one Reddit user who moved into embedded after more than seven years in web development advised career changers to “be looking to get into mid-level positions rather than entry-level. Those entry level positions are much easier and cheaper to fill with fresh graduates.”

Steps to get there

1. Learn C well, and learn to read a datasheet. Base Power asks for “Comfort reading schematics and datasheets.” One embedded developer on Reddit put the reading load this way: “You need to be able to read and understand about 1000 pages of deep technical documentation for each processor and family you work on.”
2. Get a development board and write a driver for one bus. Pick a board with an ARM Cortex-M chip, the family Base Power and Lexington Medical name. Connect a sensor and write its I2C or SPI driver from the datasheet, without the vendor’s ready-made library.
3. Add an RTOS. Port your project to FreeRTOS or Zephyr, the two systems the postings name most. Split the work into tasks, use a queue between them and add a watchdog.
4. Learn the bench tools. An oscilloscope, a logic analyzer and a JTAG or SWD debug probe, such as SEGGER’s J-Link. Practice breakpoints, register reads and catching a glitch on a signal.
5. Build one project end to end. Mikhail Skobov, a staff firmware engineer at Lyft, suggests projects like these in UW’s guide: “Over-the-air updates, building the bootloader, implementing the networking stack and things of that kind.” Keep a log of each bug you found and how.
6. Get real embedded work. An internship, a co-op, a university lab, a student robotics team, or embedded tasks in your current job.

What hardware experience each posting asks for

Here are the six postings behind this guide and the hardware work each one wants you to have done already.

Lexington Medical’s pay is an early-career range, and Lucid’s is a senior range. Compare a posted range to another posted range, not to the salary-site medians below. The industry shows up in the extras: the vehicle postings add CAN, UDS or AUTOSAR, the medical posting adds IEC 62304, and the defense posting adds U.S. Person status.

Apply with proof from the bench

1. Write your resume around the hardware. Build it in Teal’s AI Resume Builder. You can start from scratch or import a .docx or .pdf file, your LinkedIn profile or pasted text, then keep a separate version for each posting. Unlimited resumes and PDF downloads are free. In each bullet, describe the concrete action and outcome in the posting’s own terms: which board, which bus, what the scope or logic analyzer showed and what you changed. If you do not remember an exact metric, do not invent one. A concrete action and outcome are still stronger than a fabricated number.
2. Match each posting’s terms. Paste a posting into Teal’s Job Description Match to see which of its keywords your resume does not yet include. The free version shows the top 5 keywords; Teal+ shows all of them, plus custom keywords. If a posting asks for CAN and you have only used I2C, do not add CAN. Show your closest relevant experience and let the employer decide whether the gap is acceptable.
3. Track applications across title variants. Save each posting in Teal’s Job Tracker, which is free, and note the exact title, the buses and RTOS it names, and any on-site or U.S. Person line. When the same work is posted as “Embedded Software Engineer,” “Firmware Engineer” and “Embedded Firmware Engineer,” your notes keep them apart.

Embedded Software Engineer Skills

Embedded software engineers need two kinds of skill: writing code for small, constrained processors, and finding out what is wrong when the hardware and the code disagree.

Technical skills

• C, and often C++: pointers, bit fields, fixed-size integer types, memory layout, volatile, and code that runs without a heap.
• Microcontrollers: ARM Cortex-M above all in these postings.
• Peripherals and buses: SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, USB, ADC and timers.
• Interrupts and concurrency: interrupt handlers, priorities, race conditions and shared data.
• RTOS or bare metal: tasks, queues, mutexes and timing, or a main loop with interrupts on bare metal.
• Boot and update: bootloaders, secure boot and OTA updates.
• Testing: unit tests for the logic, hardware-in-the-loop tests for the device, and Python for test scripts.

KORE1, a staffing firm, says in its salary guide that an engineer who has shipped an OTA system that rolled back cleanly in the field and can produce a software bill of materials (SBOM) from a build “is worth $10,000 to $20,000 more than an equally senior engineer who has not.” KORE1 gives this as its own view, not a survey result.

Debugging and reading skills

These are what separate an embedded engineer from someone who writes C:

• Reading datasheets and schematics. Finding the register, the timing diagram and the pin that explain what the board actually does.
• Bench debugging. Base Power asks for debugging “down to the hardware.” In practice that means measuring the signal on the pin before you change a line of code.
• Patience. One Reddit user listed both sides: “Cons: Some of your bugs will take a month to fix” and “Pros: You will be able to fully understand what the code is doing and where it went wrong.”

Turn embedded work into resume evidence

A list of chips says what you have seen. A bullet about one board says what you can do.

• Weaker: “Wrote embedded C code for microcontrollers.”
• Stronger: “Wrote an I2C driver in C for a [sensor part] on an ARM Cortex-M board, checked the bus timing with a logic analyzer, and cut failed sensor reads from [number] to [number] per test run.”

Why it works: it names the chip family, the bus and the instrument, and it ends on a result you measured.

• Weaker: “Debugged hardware issues.”
• Stronger: “Traced random resets on a new board to [cause, for example a dip on a power rail] using an oscilloscope and a JTAG probe, then worked with the electrical engineer on the fix before the [build name] build.”

Why it works: it shows the boundary skill employers ask for: you found out whether the bug was in the code or the hardware, and you worked with the person who drew the board.

• Weaker: “Worked with FreeRTOS.”
• Stronger: “Moved a bare-metal motor controller’s [number] control loops onto FreeRTOS tasks and added a watchdog, so the device recovered from [fault] without a power cycle in hardware-in-the-loop tests.”

Why it works: the RTOS is still named, but the bullet is about what the device does differently, and it says where you proved it.

The [number] and other bracketed markers are placeholders. Fill them only with your own facts.

Embedded Software Engineer Tools & Software

These are the tools the six postings name, plus a few discussed alongside them.

RTOS and embedded Linux

FreeRTOS describes itself as a “Real-time operating system for microcontrollers and small microprocessors,” supports “40+ processor architectures,” and is free under the MIT license. Zephyr is a Linux Foundation project, an RTOS “optimized for resource-constrained devices.” For larger devices that run Linux, the Yocto Project builds a custom Linux for each product: “It’s not an embedded Linux distribution, it creates a custom one for you.”

The Eclipse Foundation’s 2024 survey found that on constrained devices, “Linux (46%) and FreeRTOS (29%) top the charts,” with “growth in Zephyr (21%) and ThreadX (13%).” In the same survey, as reported by I-Programmer, “C (55%), C++ (36%), Python (32%), and Java (29%) are the top programming languages for constrained devices.” The 2024 survey had 747 respondents.

Rust

The I-Programmer report says Rust is “showing steady growth in adoption,” but none of the six postings asks for it, so learn C first. Rust’s official embedded page notes that “Dynamic memory allocation is optional.” For safety-critical products, Ferrocene is a Rust toolchain qualified by TÜV SÜD for ISO 26262 (ASIL D), IEC 61508 (SIL 3) and IEC 62304 (Class C).

Embedded Software Engineer Job Titles & Career Progression

The same embedded job is posted under several titles, as the postings table shows. Anduril’s job board also lists “Senior Firmware Engineer (RTOS),” “Senior Firmware Engineer (Bare-Metal)” and “Firmware Engineer, Space Embedded Systems.”

Title variants to search

Career ladder

For model resumes in the closest role, see Teal’s software engineer resume examples.

Embedded Software Engineer Salary & Work-Life Balance

The average and median pay figures below run from about $92,000 to $162,000. Most of that gap is what each source counts: PayScale’s $92,149 is average base salary, and Glassdoor’s $162,000 is median total pay from a different group of people.

Embedded software engineer pay by source

Levels.fyi says it reports “total compensation, which is base salary plus the yearly value of stock grants plus bonus.” Compare base to base and total to total.

Pay by level

PayScale says an entry-level engineer in this role with less than a year of experience averages $78,846 in total compensation, based on 148 salaries (September 16, 2026). KORE1 gives its own 2026 base-salary bands from placement work (last updated September 3, 2026): $85,000 to $110,000 for entry level, “$125,000 to $150,000 at mid-level and $155,000 to $205,000 at senior.”

As a longer-term signal, BLS projects employment of software developers, quality assurance analysts and testers combined to grow 10% from 2025 to 2035, and employment of computer hardware engineers to grow 9%, both “much faster than the average for all occupations.”

Is the pay good? Yes. Even PayScale’s base-only average is about 1.8 times the $50,980 median wage for all US workers (BLS, May 2025). Glassdoor reports that 73% of embedded software engineers who answered are satisfied with their salary, and one Reddit user who switched into embedded 19 years ago says “the pay is excellent (in the US).”

Work-life balance

• Much of the work is on-site. Base Power says “We work in-person,” and Lexington Medical calls its role “an on-site role.”
• Remote roles exist but are fewer. Samsara’s firmware posting is remote from Austin or Seattle. On Reddit, one user described “slim chances of finding fully remote embedded role.”
• Stability views differ. One Reddit user wrote that “Embedded will typically be very stable, but harder to get into.” Another, after a layoff, wrote: “Couldn’t get a job in embedded anymore, lots of competition and not many opportunities nowadays.”

Embedded Software Engineer Professional Development Goals

Bring up one new board from first power-on

Take a board from its first power-on to running your firmware, and write down every problem you found on the way. Why: a bring-up log gives you interview stories with real detail.

Write a driver from the datasheet alone

Pick one peripheral and write its driver without the vendor’s library, then compare your timing to the datasheet with a logic analyzer. Why: it proves you can read the documents that every embedded job depends on.

Ship an update path

Add a bootloader with a safe firmware update, over a cable at first, then over the air. Why: bootloaders, secure boot and OTA updates appear in the Nuro, Samsara and Base Power postings.

Learn the standard your industry uses

If you work on cars, read how ISO 26262 shapes requirements and testing. If you work on medical devices, do the same for IEC 62304. Why: most of the credentials that exist for this role are in functional safety, and they assume you know the standard.

Embedded Software Engineer LinkedIn Profile Tips

Recruiters search by title, so use the variants that honestly describe your work. A headline such as “Embedded Software Engineer | C, FreeRTOS, ARM Cortex-M | CAN and SPI drivers for [product type]” shows the role and the hardware. Do not claim a firmware or embedded title you have not held, and fill [product type] with a real product.

Put one project in the Featured section that shows hardware: a photo of the board, a scope capture and a short write-up of a bug you found. List only skills you have used.

Embedded Software Engineer Certifications

No single certification is standard for this role, and none of the six postings lists one among its must-haves. Most credentials that exist are in functional safety, plus courses that are not certifications. For a first embedded job, a board you brought up counts for more than anything in this table.

If the Arm Accredited Engineer program shows up on an older list, do not count on it: its old Arm page now lists only approved training partners.

For more options in neighboring roles, see Teal’s guides to embedded test engineer certifications and software engineer certifications.

Embedded Software Engineer Interview Prep

Embedded interviews test the must-haves in the postings: C, the hardware it runs on, and how you debug. Prepare for questions in these areas:

• C details. Pointers, what volatile does, bit manipulation on a register, and fixed-size integer types.
• Interrupts and concurrency. What belongs in an interrupt handler, and how to share data safely between an interrupt and a task.
• An RTOS. Tasks, priorities, queues, mutexes and priority inversion, or how you would build the same design on bare metal.
• A bus walk-through. “Explain how an I2C read works, step by step.” Be ready to draw the signals for SPI, I2C, UART or CAN.
• A debugging story. “Tell me about a bug where you did not know if it was the code or the hardware.” Name the tools, what you measured and what you changed.

Can AI replace an embedded engineer?

Neither of the two surveys below measures that directly. Both were run by security vendors, and they show how widely embedded teams already use AI tools; they measure AI use, not jobs replaced.

• RunSafe Security surveyed more than 200 embedded professionals in critical infrastructure in the US, UK and Germany and found that “80.5% of respondents currently use AI tools in embedded development” (December 2025). It also found that 83.5% have deployed AI-generated code to production, and 53% named security as their top concern with AI-generated code.
• Black Duck’s survey of 785 development and security professionals, run by Censuswide in June 2025, found that “89.3% of organizations are already using AI-powered coding assistants,” while 21.1% of companies lack confidence that they can stop AI from introducing security vulnerabilities.

Samsara’s posting asks for AI skill outright: “You use AI smartly. It’s part of your every day work flow and multiplies your output without watering things down.” The same posting still describes first power-on and bring-up as hands-on work at the bench. If an interviewer asks about AI, describe how you use it and how you check its output on hardware.

For practice questions, use Teal’s embedded test engineer interview questions and software engineer interview questions. For a model application letter, see the software engineer cover letter examples.

Related Career Paths

Each of these careers overlaps with embedded software work.

Embedded Test Engineer

Embedded test engineers design the test plans and rigs that check embedded systems work. They use the same bench tools.

Hardware Engineer

Hardware engineers design the boards and components that embedded code runs on. You work next to them during bring-up.

IoT Engineer

IoT engineers build connected devices and the systems behind them. The device side of that work is embedded software.

Robotics Engineer

Robotics engineers design machines that sense and move. Motor control, sensors and real-time code are shared ground.

Software Engineer

Software engineers build applications and services on general-purpose computers. Testing and design skills carry over in both directions.

Electrical Engineer

Electrical engineers design circuits and power systems. Lucid’s senior posting requires an electrical engineering or related degree.