Senior SDET - Firmware Automation

Job Title

Senior SDET - Firmware Automation

Role Summary

The Senior SDET for Firmware Automation will design and own firmware test automation frameworks, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) infrastructure, and CI integration to validate firmware on real photonic hardware. You will work closely with firmware and hardware engineers at the bench and influence firmware design for testability and diagnostics.

Experience Level

Senior - typically 8+ years of professional software development experience, primarily on embedded products and test automation.

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities include building test frameworks, HIL systems, and ensuring continuous firmware validation on physical hardware.

• Own architecture and roadmap for firmware test automation across products and teams.
• Design and implement production-quality automation for firmware features and hardware.
• Build and operate HIL infrastructure: bench/rack fixtures, device farms, power/reset control, instrument integration, and CI orchestration.
• Define test strategy, plans, reporting, and lead cross-team test plan reviews.
• Integrate firmware testing into CI/CD so changes are built, flashed, exercised on hardware, and reported automatically.
• Track and improve framework reliability and flaky test metrics.
• Build telemetry, logs, and triage pipelines for trend analysis and release decisions.
• Debug failures across firmware, board, instrument, fixture, and test code; collaborate with engineers to resolve issues.
• Participate in firmware design reviews to improve testability and diagnostics.
• Mentor engineers on test architecture and document systems for non-specialists.

Requirements

Must-have technical skills and experience to perform the role effectively.

• 8+ years professional software development on embedded products, with significant experience designing test frameworks and infrastructure.
• Proven track record of architecting and delivering at least one automation framework or HIL system adopted and used daily by engineers.
• Strong Python skills for fixture layers, hardware drivers, and plugin/configuration architectures.
• Working fluency in embedded C/C++ sufficient to read firmware drivers/state machines and write edge-case tests.
• Experience owning CI/CD pipelines that run tests on physical hardware (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins), including runner health, hardware allocation, and recovery.
• Experience with test and measurement equipment integration and debugging using tools such as GDB, JTAG, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes.
• Ability to debug across the full stack and collaborate with cross-functional teams to resolve hardware/firmware/test failures.
• Capacity to comply with U.S. export control laws.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience testing optical transceivers, photonic systems, or precision analog/mixed-signal hardware.
• Familiarity with CMIS, OpenBMC, DMTF/Redfish and embedded OS tooling (Zephyr, FreeRTOS) and related test tooling (Twister, ztest, Renode, QEMU).
• Experience with the Pytest ecosystem and AI-assisted tools for test generation or triage.
• Startup experience.

Education Requirements

BS or MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. Preferred: PhD or MS with extensive (8+ years) embedded test automation or firmware development experience. Equivalent experience language is accepted.

About the Company

Company: Lightmatter

Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Lightmatter develops photonic AI data-center infrastructure and optical chips for extreme-scale AI and HPC. The company invented the Passage 3D‑stacked photonics engine to provide high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnects across large-scale processors and raised $400M in Series D financing at a reported $4.4B valuation.