Senior Firmware Engineer

Silicon Motion; Milpitas (CA); Hybrid; USD 187,000 - 188,000; Full time

Job summary

Silicon Motion in Milpitas, CA is seeking a Senior Firmware Engineer to design, develop, and maintain embedded firmware for SSD controllers and storage platforms, focusing on FTL, wear leveling, and data integrity.

You will optimize I/O data paths, implement power-on and recovery processes, collaborate with ASIC/hardware teams, and ensure performance, reliability, and compliance with NVMe/PCIe specifications.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Computing and Technology, or a closely related field.
• 2+ years of experience as Firmware Engineer in embedded firmware for SSD products.
• Knowledge of flash memory components, garbage collection and wear leveling, NVMe SSD firmware, and multi-core or multiprocessor SoCs.
• Proficiency in C/C++ for embedded systems; strong debugging skills with GDB; experience with Git/Jira.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain embedded firmware for SSD controllers and storage platforms.
• Optimize firmware I/O data path and control path for performance.
• Implement and maintain FTL components: logical-to-physical mapping, GC, wear leveling.
• Develop firmware error handling and data integrity mechanisms for NAND-based storage.
• Support power-on init, power-loss handling, and recovery processes for data consistency.
• Develop low-level firmware for SoC storage controllers and system bring-up.

Skills

C/C++

Embedded firmware

NVMe/PCIe

Debugging (GDB)

Git & Jira

Education

Master's degree in Computer Engineering / CS / related

Tools

GDB

Git

Jira

Job description

Job Title

Senior Firmware Engineer Silicon Motion, Inc., 690 N. McCarthy Blvd., Suite 200, Milpitas, CA 95035, is seeking to hire a Senior Firmware Engineer.

Job Summary:

Responsible for the design, development, and maintenance of embedded firmware for solid-state storage systems, including Flash Translation Layer (FTL), NAND flash management, I/O data path, and system-level integration to ensure performance, reliability, and data integrity.

Job Duties include:

• Designing, developing, testing, and maintaining embedded firmware for SSD controllers and related storage hardware platforms.
• Developing and optimizing firmware for I/O data path and control path operations to enable efficient storage system performance.
• Implementing and maintaining Flash Translation Layer (FTL) components, including logical-to-physical address mapping, garbage collection, and wear leveling.
• Developing firmware-level error handling and data integrity mechanisms for NAND flash-based storage systems.
• Developing firmware supporting power-on initialization, power-loss handling, and recovery processes to ensure data consistency.
• Developing and optimizing low-level firmware for SoC-based storage controllers, including hardware initialization and system bring-up routines.
• Implementing and supporting NVMe and PCIe storage interfaces in compliance with industry specifications.
• Performing debugging, root cause analysis, and performance profiling using hardware and software development tools.
• Conducting firmware validation including stress testing and corner-case verification to ensure system stability and reliability.
• Collaborating with ASIC, hardware, validation, and customer engineering teams on system integration and issue resolution.

Minimum Requirements:

• Master’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Computing and Technology, or a closely related field.
• 2-year experience as Firmware Engineer in the field of embedded firmware development for SSD products.
• Require knowledge of flash memory components such as garbage collection and wear leveling, NVMe SSD firmware development, and multi-core or multiprocessor SoC architectures.
• Require programming language in C/C++ for embedded systems.
• Require skills in debugging tools such as GDB, and software development and collaboration tools including Git and Jira.

Salary: $187,075.00 - $188,000.00 per year