Engineering Embedded Systems Engineer Melbourne (HQ) / Sydney / Remote Australia 3+ years

NXTGEN Industries; City of Melbourne; Hybrid; AUD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

NXTGEN Industries in Melbourne is seeking an Embedded Systems Engineer to design and maintain firmware and hardware interfaces for robotic inspection platforms operating in demanding field conditions.

You will design firmware for control boards, sensor interfaces, and communication modules, develop HALs for sensors and power systems, and work with ROS 2 interfaces to expose embedded subsystems to the autonomy stack. Occasional travel to project sites is possible.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of embedded firmware development in C/C++ for production hardware.
• Experience with real-time operating systems (FreeRTOS, Zephyr, or bare-metal RTOS patterns).
• Strong understanding of CAN, SPI, I2C, UART, RS-485.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement firmware for robotic control boards, sensor interfaces, and communication modules.
• Develop and maintain hardware abstraction layers for sensors, actuators, and power systems.
• Implement and optimise CAN, RS-485, SPI, I2C, Ethernet communication.
• Work with ROS 2 hardware interfaces to expose embedded subsystems to the autonomy stack.
• Design and validate power management systems for extended field operation.
• Contribute to PCB design reviews and hardware bring-up processes.
• Develop automated test fixtures and HIL (hardware-in-the-loop) environments.

Skills

Embedded firmware

C/C++

RTOS

Linux integration

Tools

ROS 2

PCB design review

Job description

The Role

We are looking for an Embedded Systems Engineer to design and maintain the firmware and hardware interfaces that make our robotic inspection platforms operate reliably in demanding field conditions.

What You Will Do

• Design and implement firmware for robotic control boards, sensor interfaces, and communication modules
• Develop and maintain hardware abstraction layers for sensors, actuators, and power systems
• Implement and optimise communication protocols: CAN bus, RS-485, SPI, I2C, Ethernet
• Work with ROS 2 hardware interfaces to expose embedded subsystems to the autonomy stack
• Design and validate power management systems for extended field operation
• Contribute to PCB design reviews and hardware bring-up processes
• Develop automated test fixtures and HIL (hardware-in-the-loop) test environments

What We Are Looking For

• 3+ years of embedded firmware development in C/C++ for production hardware
• Experience with real-time operating systems (FreeRTOS, Zephyr, or bare-metal RTOS patterns)
• Strong understanding of communication protocols: CAN, SPI, I2C, UART, RS-485
• Experience integrating embedded systems with Linux-based compute platforms
• Ability to read and review schematics, contribute to hardware design discussions
• Experience in an industrial, robotics, or safety-critical embedded context is highly regarded

Where You’ll Work

Our head office is in Melbourne and we have a second office in Sydney. We are open to flexible and remote working arrangements anywhere in Australia for the right person, so where you are based should not stop you from applying.

This role does involve periodic travel to sites where our systems are deployed, across infrastructure, rail and construction projects around the country.