WLAN Firmware Engineer (Embedded) - AI-Assisted Development

Qualcomm; Santa Clara, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 111,000 - 167,000; Full time

Job summary

Qualcomm is seeking a Software Engineer to join the WLAN HAL-PHY firmware team in Santa Clara. You will own production-quality C/C++ firmware across the full embedded lifecycle, from architecture to lab bring-up and customer release.

You will drive architectural decisions, collaborate with chip designers, RF engineers, and hardware board engineers, and mentor juniors while leveraging AI-assisted development workflows to accelerate debugging and validation of next-generation WLAN platforms.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field.
• 2+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience.
• 2+ years of experience with Database Management Software.
• 2+ years of experience with API.
• 1+ year of work experience with Git, Perforce, or Source Code Management System.

Responsibilities

• Lead software architecture enhancements using established SW design patterns; re-architect existing firmware modules and design new ones from the ground up.
• Write, review, and own production-quality low-level firmware in a resource-constrained embedded environment (small memory footprint DSP/ARM processors).
• Develop WLAN offload firmware running on dedicated co-processor cores, independent of the host processor.
• Diagnose and resolve complex WLAN and RF system performance issues; analyze power, spectrum, and waveform quality using RF test equipment and IQ capture data.
• Design, implement, unit test, and document features for next-generation WLAN platforms (802.11be and beyond).
• Partner with chip designers, hardware board engineers, and RF specialists during silicon bring-up and lab validation.
• Optimize firmware for maximum throughput and minimal latency; profile and eliminate bottlenecks.
• Support customer launch and release cycles; resolve production field issues — occasional travel to customer sites may be required.
• Use AI coding assistants (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor) as active partners during firmware development — generating boilerplate, reviewing diffs, and iterating on HAL-PHY register access logic — while exercising senior-level judgment to validate and refine AI output against hardware specifications and existing architecture patterns.
• Leverage MCP (Model Context Protocol) server toolchains for code navigation, HW register lookup, crash dump analysis, and root cause attribution — including tools such as cscope MCP for symbol search, swi-hw-sw MCP for SWI contract verification, and SmartScope/TimeTravel for crash triage — reducing manual investigation cycles on complex firmware failures.
• Participate in and help refine the team’s AI-assisted SDLC pipeline, which spans LLM-based requirements analysis, SW SDD generation, automated code review (via LLMCommittee), and on-device test recommendation — providing feedback on AI-generated artifacts, catching hallucinations or mismatched assumptions, and improving prompt and workflow quality over time.
• Drive technical documentation standards and code review culture across the team.

Skills

C/C++ firmware

Embedded systems

Hardware collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field

Tools

Git

Perforce

Source Code Management

Job description

Qualcomm is seeking a Software Engineer to join the WLAN HAL-PHY firmware team in Santa Clara. You will own production-quality C/C++ firmware across the full embedded lifecycle, from architecture to lab bring-up and customer release.

You will drive architectural decisions, collaborate with chip designers, RF engineers, and hardware board engineers, and mentor juniors while leveraging AI-assisted development workflows to accelerate debugging and validation of next-generation WLAN platforms.