Embedded Systems Engineer

PassFort; United States; On-site; USD 54,000 - 74,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension with SIPP options

Weekly pastries

Monthly all-hands lunches

Autonomy & accountability culture

Job summary

Unicorn Biotechnologies is hiring an embedded systems engineer to own electronics and firmware across our product platforms. You’ll design schematics and PCB layouts, prototype in-house, and drive production boards from concept to shipped hardware with production firmware on STM32/ARM microcontrollers.

You’ll bridge hardware and software, implementing CAN, Ethernet, and serial communications while collaborating with a small team in a lab environment.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience across both electronics hardware design (schematic capture, PCB layout, component selection) and firmware development (C/C++ on microcontrollers such as STM32/ARM).
• Competence with PCB design tools (Altium, KiCad, or equivalent) and hands-on prototyping skills: comfortable with soldering (THT and SMD), rework, and bench testing.
• Strong understanding of real-time systems, interrupts, peripherals, and hardware abstraction layers.
• Experience with communication protocols: CAN, SPI, I2C, UART, Ethernet/TCP-IP.
• Comfort interfacing embedded systems with higher-level application layers (Python, REST APIs, MQTT, or similar).
• Evidence of taking designs from concept through to production hardware running deployed firmware.
• Experience developing or maintaining full-stack software with a Python backend.
• A methodical approach to debugging, testing, and documentation.

Responsibilities

• Schematic design and PCB layout for control boards, sensor interfaces, power distribution, and system interconnects.
• Prototyping and validating designs in our in-house electronics workshop, driving rapid iteration from concept to working board.
• Design for manufacture: translating prototypes into production-ready boards, managing BOM optimisation, and coordinating with contract manufacturers.
• Writing and maintaining production firmware in C/C++ on STM32/ARM microcontrollers, real-time control of pumps, valves, sensors, and actuators.
• Designing and implementing inter-device communication (CAN, Ethernet, serial) across networked instruments.
• Supporting EMC, CE, and UL compliance testing and designing for long-term reliability in regulated environments.

Skills

Electronics hardware design

Firmware development

Schematic capture

PCB layout

C/C++ programming

STM32/ARM

Real-time systems

CAN

Ethernet

Python

REST APIs

MQTT

Debugging

Prototyping

Documentation

Tools

Altium

KiCad

Soldering

Rework

Job description

Anticipated start date: As soon as possible

Salary Band: £40k - £55k (depending on experience)

Full-time, Sheffield, UK

Do you want to utilise your engineering skills to make a real-world impact? We are developing a platform to help solve all disease, not just one area from cancer biology through to cardiological conditions and beyond.

AI Science and Autonomous Labs are buzzwords, we are actually building the necessary infrastructure, hardware and software tooling to enable scientists to design, execute and analyse experiments without human intervention. We already work with global biopharma companies and the most ambitious organisations you will have heard of.

We need an embedded systems engineer who helps us build both: the boards and the code that runs on them.

This is a role for someone who genuinely works across the full stack of embedded development; schematic capture and PCB layout one week, production firmware in C/C++ the next, field debugging a deployed system the week after. You'll take a design from concept through to manufactured, tested hardware running production firmware in a real lab.

If you've spent your career at a consultancy handing off designs you never see shipped, or at a large company owning one narrow slice of a system, this is your chance to own the whole thing.

WE VALUE

• Engineers who care about what they build, not just how.
• Clear thinking, pragmatism, and sound judgment over buzzwords.
• A bias for action to build products with customer value.
• Friendly, organised, efficient, and enthusiastic people with a can-do attitude.
• People who take responsibility and follow problems through.
• Using the right tools, including AI, to work smarter, not harder.
• Low-ego individuals who love asking questions & go above and beyond to help the team succeed.

THE ROLE

You'll work alongside our principal engineer and the engineering team to design, test and manufacture the electronics and embedded systems across our products and platforms. Day-to-day, that means:

• Schematic design and PCB layout for control boards, sensor interfaces, power distribution, and system interconnects.
• Prototyping and validating designs in our in-house electronics workshop, driving rapid iteration from concept to working board.
• Design for manufacture: translating prototypes into production-ready boards, managing BOM optimisation, and coordinating with contract manufacturers.
• Writing and maintaining production firmware in C/C++ on STM32/ARM microcontrollers, real-time control of pumps, valves, sensors, and actuators.
• Designing and implementing inter-device communication (CAN, Ethernet, serial) across networked instruments.
• Supporting EMC, CE, and UL compliance testing and designing for long-term reliability in regulated environments.

You'll have high autonomy and direct influence on technical decisions. The learning curve is steep, but you'll expand your skills faster here than in most environments, and everything you build ships to real customers.

NEED TO HAVE

• Demonstrated experience across both electronics hardware design (schematic capture, PCB layout, component selection) and firmware development (C/C++ on microcontrollers such as STM32/ARM).
• Competence with PCB design tools (Altium, KiCad, or equivalent) and hands-on prototyping skills: comfortable with soldering (THT and SMD), rework, and bench testing.
• Strong understanding of real-time systems, interrupts, peripherals, and hardware abstraction layers.
• Experience with communication protocols: CAN, SPI, I2C, UART, Ethernet/TCP-IP.
• Comfort interfacing embedded systems with higher-level application layers (Python, REST APIs, MQTT, or similar).
• Evidence of taking designs from concept through to production hardware running deployed firmware.
• Experience developing or maintaining full-stack software with a Python backend.
• A methodical approach to debugging, testing, and documentation.

NICE TO HAVE

• Comfort using AI-assisted dev tools (Cursor, Claude Code) to accelerate workflows.
• Exposure to industrial control, robotics, or bioprocess instrumentation.
• Understanding of compliance testing (EMC, CE, UL) and design for reliability.
• Prior experience in a startup or scale-up environment.

While we consider applicants from any relevant background, you will likely have >3 years of relevant industry experience.

BENEFITS

• Product ownership: your hardware and firmware ship on systems deployed in real labs, helping scientists advance real science.
• Pension with SIPP options and support managing your investments if you want it.
• Weekly team pastries and monthly all-hands lunches.
• A culture that values autonomy, accountability and responsibility.
• Based in Sheffield, the UK's greenest city, on the doorstep of the Peak District, <15 minutes from our purpose-built R&D and manufacturing facility.

ABOUT US

Unicorn Biotechnologies is building the infrastructure for autonomous cell biology. We combine hardware, software, machine intelligence and biology into powerful, easy-to-use platforms that let scientists and manufacturers standardise, scale, and automate their workflows. We're a Sheffield-based team with deep R&D foundations, now scaling to meet growing demand from our global customer base. You'll have real ownership over your work, genuine influence on product direction, and the chance to shape a company at a scale-up inflection point.

Unicorn Biotechnologies is an equal opportunity employer committed to providing a working environment that embraces inclusion and diversity.