Firmware Engineer

Job Title

Firmware Engineer

Role Summary

Develop low-level firmware for a hybrid optical-electronic LLM accelerator. Implement firmware that controls custom compute hardware, define software–hardware interfaces, and deliver reliable firmware for production and customer integration.

Work within the engineering team on firmware, tooling, testing, and performance optimization across the stack.

Experience Level

Mid-level (3–5 years of professional firmware or embedded systems experience)

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities include firmware development, system integration, testing, and customer support.

• Design and implement low-level firmware (embedded C/C++) to orchestrate LLM workloads on accelerator hardware.
• Implement system and board management code, register-level drivers, and memory-mapped I/O.
• Create debugging, profiling, and diagnostic tools for firmware–hardware interaction.
• Collaborate with hardware engineers to define and iterate software–hardware interfaces.
• Optimize end-to-end performance from application layer through hardware execution.
• Develop automated testing, validation frameworks, and hardware-in-the-loop tests.
• Document firmware APIs and system behavior; support customer integration and technical troubleshooting.

Requirements

Required technical skills and experience.

Must-have:

• 3–5 years of professional experience in firmware engineering, embedded systems, or low-level systems programming.
• High proficiency in embedded C++ (essential); Python for tooling and automation.
• Experience with embedded systems programming, hardware interfaces, and register-level programming.
• Familiarity with computer architecture, memory hierarchies, parallel computing, and performance optimization.
• Experience with hardware communication protocols and low-level debugging tools (JTAG, GDB, logic analyzers).

Nice-to-have:

• Experience with ARM, RISC-V, or similar embedded processors and toolchains.
• Experience with RTOS or bare-metal development (FreeRTOS, Zephyr) and cross-compilation toolchains.
• Experience with PCIe, Ethernet, or other bus protocols; multi-node or multi-processor systems.
• Experience with virtual platforms/simulators, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and CI pipelines.

Education Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field required. Master's degree in a related field preferred.

About the Company

Company: Neurophos

Headquarters: Sunnyvale, California, United States

Startup developing silicon-photonic AI accelerator chips that use programmable metasurfaces and dense optical cells to perform matrix multiplications at the speed of light, targeting large-scale AI inference with much higher energy efficiency and performance than traditional electronic approaches.