Senior Firmware Engineer

Microsoft • Mountain View, CA

1d

About The Position

Microsoft Silicon and Cloud Hardware Infrastructure Engineering (SCHIE) powers Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud mission by delivering infrastructure and foundational technologies for Microsoft’s online businesses and Azure platform. The FW/SW Center of Excellence team develops hardware and firmware for Azure infrastructure, including next-generation server, silicon, and rack infrastructure, with a focus on firmware innovation and security.

The Senior Firmware Engineer will design, implement, validate, and debug low-level SoC and silicon firmware. The role owns firmware for one or more IPs or subsystems from architecture through production and works across firmware, hardware, and software boundaries to bring up new silicon and platform features, root-cause complex issues, and improve firmware quality.

Requirements

• Doctorate in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field and at least 1 year of technical engineering experience; or a master's degree in one of those fields and at least 4 years of technical engineering experience; or a bachelor's degree in one of those fields and at least 5 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

• 7–10 years of industry experience in firmware design, development, and productization, preferably including several years on server-class platforms.
• Strong understanding of SoC architecture, particularly server-class SoCs.
• Experience implementing microarchitecture (Arm and x86), firmware design, and design verification.
• Deep expertise in one or more of management and user cores, security IPs and flows, boot sequences, and IP-level silicon firmware library development.
• Strong experience in pre-silicon validation using simulation and emulation platforms such as FPGA, ZeBu, and Palladium.
• Hands-on experience with silicon bring-up and post-silicon validation.
• Strong SoC debug expertise, including hands-on experience with JTAG, Arm Development Studio (Arm DS), and Lauterbach TRACE32.
• Experience in ATE (automated test equipment) environments and initial wafer bring-up.
• Knowledge of platform and security firmware, such as Arm TrustZone.
• Good understanding of operating system driver development for Linux and Windows.
• Experience leading a small team of engineers.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement low-level SoC firmware and silicon firmware libraries.
• Own firmware for one or more IPs or subsystems from architecture through production.
• Work with silicon architects to define firmware/hardware interfaces and initialization flows.
• Develop reusable, modular firmware APIs and frameworks.
• Develop and debug boot, initialization, reset, error-handling, and recovery flows.
• Participate in pre-silicon validation and first-silicon bring-up.
• Perform system-level debugging across firmware, hardware, and software boundaries.
• Analyze complex failures using logs, telemetry, register state, and hardware debug tools.
• Work closely with architecture, RTL/DV, validation, security, platform firmware, and driver teams.
• Drive issues independently from reproduction through root-cause analysis and resolution.
• Improve firmware quality through unit tests, validation automation, and reusable test infrastructure.
• Mentor engineers and influence technical design within the feature or subsystem area.

Benefits

• Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation; additional benefits and pay information is available on the Microsoft careers website.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior