Senior Firmware Engineer

Danaher•San Jose, CA

6h•Onsite

About The Position

Molecular Devices, a Danaher operating company, develops automated and AI-enabled technology for life science customers in academia, biotech, pharma, and government. The Senior Firmware Engineer designs, develops, verifies, and maintains embedded firmware for advanced scientific imaging and automation instruments. The role supports shared and complementary embedded technologies across imaging instrument platforms, including real-time control, precision motion, imaging hardware, communications, firmware updates, environmental control, diagnostics, and multi-board integration. The position is part of the Engineering team in San Jose, California, reports to the Software Engineering Manager, and is an on-site role supporting hands-on instrument development and integration. The engineer collaborates with electrical, mechanical, systems, test, application software, and manufacturing teams to develop and integrate instrument subsystems and deliver production firmware.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
At least 5 years of professional embedded firmware development experience, including ownership of production systems through development, integration, release, and maintenance.
Expert proficiency in embedded C and strong proficiency in modern C++ for resource-constrained microcontrollers.
Practical experience with STM32 or comparable Arm Cortex-M platforms.
Hands-on experience developing RTOS-based and non-RTOS embedded systems, including interrupts, DMA, timers, concurrency, memory constraints, and fault handling.
Experience designing and maintaining hardware-facing firmware using UART, I2C, SPI, PWM, ADC/DAC, GPIO, Ethernet/TCP, or comparable interfaces.
Ability to read schematics and datasheets and diagnose hardware–firmware interactions using oscilloscopes, digital multimeters, logic analyzers, and other standard bench tools.
Demonstrated experience with code reviews, automated testing, technical documentation, and disciplined root-cause analysis for complex embedded products.
Willing and able to travel up to 10%.
Able to lift up to 50 pounds.

Nice To Haves

Experience developing scientific instruments, microscopy systems, laboratory automation, imaging systems, or other complex electromechanical products.
Experience integrating device drivers with application software.

Responsibilities

Design and deliver production embedded firmware in C and modern C++ for STM32-based controllers, including maintainable architectures for multi-board scientific instruments and board-specific applications.
Lead hardware bring-up, subsystem integration, and performance optimization across motion, imaging, illumination, sensing, temperature control, and other instrument functions.
Develop and troubleshoot real-time FreeRTOS and CMSIS-RTOS applications, including task scheduling, synchronization, queues, notifications, timers, interrupts, DMA, memory usage, and fault recovery.
Implement device communications and update capabilities, including peripheral drivers, framed host-device protocols, CRC-protected messaging, Ethernet/TCP services, embedded networking, bootloaders, flash programming, image verification, and persistent configuration.
Build unit, integration, hardware-assisted, and hardware-in-the-loop tests; maintain build and continuous-integration workflows; lead design and code reviews; document interfaces and decisions; mentor engineers; and conduct root-cause analysis of regressions and field issues.