Senior Embedded Firmware & FPGA Engineer

Obsidian; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Mercor seeks experienced Software and Firmware Engineers to advance an AI-driven hardware initiative. You will work hands-on across embedded firmware, FPGA/RTL, and flight software, interfacing with real-world hardware and test systems.

You will review designs, analyze real-time constraints, and ensure robust software-hardware integration in production environments. Strong debugging and system-level thinking are essential for success.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software, firmware, FPGA, or embedded systems engineering experience, with hands-on work on real hardware.
• Responsible engineer for production hardware-connected software or firmware, owning lifecycle stages from requirements to deployment.
• Deep expertise in embedded firmware/real-time systems or FPGA/RTL design and verification or hardware test automation and HIL infrastructure.
• Proficient with C/C++, Python, RTOS/bare-metal, device drivers, embedded Linux, SPI/I²C/UART/CAN/Ethernet, Verilog/SystemVerilog, FPGA toolchains, hardware interfaces, telemetry, and automated test systems.
• Experience debugging software-hardware interactions using JTAG/SWD, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and CI infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Apply hands-on software, firmware, and digital hardware expertise to complex tasks on real physical systems.
• Review and evaluate embedded firmware, FPGA/RTL designs, flight software, test automation frameworks, and system interfaces.
• Analyze architecture and trade-offs for real-time performance, timing, memory, compute, interfaces, reliability, and hardware/software integration.
• Assess technical correctness, robustness, and practicality of solutions for embedded and hardware-connected systems.
• Identify implementation errors, race conditions, timing issues, and interface failures in the system.
• Develop or review rigorous engineering problems, reference implementations, test cases, and evaluation criteria.
• Draw on hands-on experience with hardware bring-up, debugging, verification, and deployment; provide clear technical feedback.
• Lead efforts to ensure systems meet production hardware constraints and safety considerations.

Skills

Embedded firmware

FPGA/RTL

Flight software

Hardware test automation

C/C++

Python

RTOS/bare-metal

Embedded Linux

Tools

Verilog/SystemVerilog/VHDL

FPGA toolchains

JTAG/SWD

Job description

Mercor seeks experienced Software and Firmware Engineers to advance an AI-driven hardware initiative. You will work hands-on across embedded firmware, FPGA/RTL, and flight software, interfacing with real-world hardware and test systems.

You will review designs, analyze real-time constraints, and ensure robust software-hardware integration in production environments. Strong debugging and system-level thinking are essential for success.