Senior Embedded Firmware QA Engineer – Fleet-Scale Testing

Icehouseventures; Auckland; On-site; NZD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Snacks and drinks

Health insurance with Southern Cross

Parental leave

Self-development budget $1000

Wellness leave

Employee stock ownership plan

Job summary

Halter is seeking a Firmware Test Engineer to join our Device Platform team to ensure collar firmware behaves as intended, at fleet scale. You’ll be embedded with firmware and hardware engineers, catching issues on the bench before they reach the paddock.

You’ll build automation, design test strategies from low-level FreeRTOS behavior to cloud data, and integrate regression tests into our CI/CD to protect every firmware release.

Qualifications

• Experience testing embedded firmware or software for a real, physical product.
• Strong automation chops in Python, building or maintaining a test framework from the ground up.
• Comfortable with a debugger and bench setup; familiarity with hardware interfaces (UART, SPI, I2C, JTAG).
• CI/CD pipelines wired into workflow already; able to integrate tests into release processes.
• Sharp troubleshooter who forms hypotheses, tests them, and knows when to loop in engineers.
• Works well in a fast-moving Agile team and proactively tests what matters next.

Responsibilities

• Get hands-on with real collar hardware (GPS, LoRa mesh, cellular, BLE, sensors) and build test rigs and automation.
• Design and own test strategies for collar firmware, from low-level FreeRTOS behavior to cloud data.
• Build automated regression and hardware-in-the-loop test frameworks (Python) and wire into CI/CD so every firmware release has coverage.
• Trace issues from signals to uplinks, protobuf payloads, and data stores like Athena/Elasticsearch.
• Analyze fleet data (Grafana, Athena, Elasticsearch) to spot regressions and reliability issues at scale.
• Collaborate with firmware engineers to turn flaky behavior into reproducible defects with root causes.
• Improve testing culture with better test plans, regression coverage, and release confidence.

Skills

Embedded testing

Python automation

CI/CD pipelines

Debugger skills

Agile environment

Troubleshooting

Tools

UART

SPI

I2C

JTAG

Job description

Halter is seeking a Firmware Test Engineer to join our Device Platform team to ensure collar firmware behaves as intended, at fleet scale. You’ll be embedded with firmware and hardware engineers, catching issues on the bench before they reach the paddock.

You’ll build automation, design test strategies from low-level FreeRTOS behavior to cloud data, and integrate regression tests into our CI/CD to protect every firmware release.