Firmware Engineer II

Microsoft•Hillsboro, OR

About The Position

Microsoft Silicon and Cloud Hardware Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) develops infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft's cloud services. Within SCHIE, the Firmware Center of Excellence creates firmware for Microsoft's cloud infrastructure, powering servers and racks globally. The team works on next-generation hardware and firmware for server, silicon, and rack infrastructure, with a focus on firmware innovation and securing Azure infrastructure. The Firmware Engineer II will develop and maintain firmware and debugging capabilities for MAIA and Cobalt platforms and collaborate with teams across firmware, silicon, platforms, operating systems, and fleet engineering.

Requirements

Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field and at least 1 year of technical engineering experience; or a bachelor's degree in one of those fields and at least 2 years of 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 or transfer and every two years thereafter.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's or master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
At least 3 years of professional experience in embedded-system design, development, integration, validation, or system-level debugging.
Experience developing embedded firmware in C or C++.
Experience debugging firmware or embedded systems using logs, source-level debugging, or hardware tools.
Experience scripting for automation or engineering-data analysis.

Responsibilities

Develop and maintain embedded firmware, low-level drivers, initialization flows, and diagnostic instrumentation for MAIA and Cobalt platforms.
Investigate boot failures, crashes, hangs, and functional or reliability issues using source code, register state, logs, crash dumps, and hardware debug tools.
Reproduce failures in lab environments and implement firmware fixes, workarounds, and regression tests.
Develop scripts and reusable tools for telemetry collection, failure-signature extraction, and automated analysis across lab and fleet datasets.
Use data analysis and approved AI-assisted tools to summarize evidence and identify patterns, and validate conclusions against hardware and firmware behavior.
Collaborate with firmware, silicon, platform, OS, and fleet teams to resolve issues and document reproducible debug procedures and lessons learned.