Senior Embedded Software Engineer

CACI•Herndon, VA

10d•$113,200 - $237,800

About The Position

Design, architect, and implement complex embedded RF systems as part of a multidisciplinary team building specialized tools, sensors, and communications devices for demanding applications. Contribute to software architecture decisions for inter-processor and microservice systems, with direct impact on system performance, real-time behavior, and high-rate RF data processing in resource-constrained environments. Work across the embedded system stack, from signal-processing algorithms and FPGA fabric to application layers and hardware interfaces. Own technical design from initial architecture through production deployment, balancing schedule, performance, portability, and maintainability.

Requirements

At least 7 years of professional software engineering experience in embedded systems and/or high-performance computing in Linux-based environments.
BS or MS in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
Strong C++ proficiency for embedded real-time systems, including concurrency, memory management, and optimization techniques.
Demonstrated experience designing and implementing software architectures and communicating technical concepts through documentation and diagrams.
Experience developing and debugging multithreaded applications and concurrency issues, including race conditions in inter-processor and microservice architectures.
Working knowledge of software design patterns and development methodologies for complex systems.
Experience with modern build systems and DevOps tools such as Conan, Docker, and GitLab or similar tools.
Experience using performance analysis and debugging tools such as vTune, perf, gdb, and valgrind, or similar tools, to identify and optimize bottlenecks.
Ability to make informed trade-offs between portability, performance, and architecture-specific optimizations.
Must be a US citizen.

Nice To Haves

Experience with communications systems and digital signal processing, including filters, modulation/demodulation schemes, channel equalization, and forward error correction (FEC).
Experience with wireless communications protocols such as 3GPP, IEEE 802.11, and IEEE 802.15.
Understanding of the signal-processing pipeline from RF data collection through digital processing.

Responsibilities

Design distributed software architectures across x86, ARM, and FPGA processing domains, defining communication patterns and data flows for real-time RF signal-processing systems.
Develop high-performance C++ frameworks for inter-processor communication where latency and throughput are critical.
Create technical documentation, including message sequence charts, UML class diagrams, and software architecture specifications.
Design microservice architectures for x86 and ARM platforms while balancing modularity, performance, and resource constraints.
Profile and optimize memory-bound and compute-bound software workloads using tools such as vTune; identify bottlenecks and deliver measurable improvements.
Work with signal-processing engineers to design data pipelines that move RF samples from ADCs through filters, demodulators, and decoders.
Develop debugging approaches for resource-constrained embedded systems with limited visibility from standard tools.
Build C++ and Python test harnesses and unit tests to generate representative workloads, validate system behavior, and verify edge cases.
Integrate CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and build automation into development practices.
Collaborate with FPGA engineers to define hardware/software interfaces that use programmable logic while maintaining software flexibility.