Staff Firmware Engineer

A Staff Engineer with embedded firmware development and debugging skills is required for our design centre in Cardiff. Working in a small versatile Agile team, the candidate's work will be involved in product design and sustaining activities on a range of Third Millenium’s ® RFID access control products. Previous experience designing cryptographic code for secure applications would be highly desirable for this role. The candidate needs to be able to effectively manage their time to support work on a variety of products at different stages of the product's lifecycle, and to be able to collaborate well with colleagues from different departments both onsite and overseas. Occasional travel may be required.

Staff Engineer is seen as a grounded and reliable engineer who is a master of their specific domain. Capable of owning technical design for projects of moderate complexity and understands the tradeoffs in creating good work/output/product in their field. They are aware and self-learn industry best practices & trends and have acquired at least one major skill outside of their area of expertise. This Engineer shows initiative beyond completing tasks list; they can identify and suggest areas of future work for themselves and their teams. The Staff Engineer self-seeks evidence to support their ideas and builds cases for these ideas.

Duties and Responsibilities include the following:

• Design and Implementation of embedded firmware and test solutions primarily in C and C#
• Design and implementation of cryptographic solutions.
• Creation of design documentation.
• Practical hands-on experience working with and debugging embedded systems.
• Working in a team environment.
• They require little oversight beyond high level direction and can take a complex scenario, breaking it down into sub-tasks, and completing sub-tasks with relative ease.
• Communicates technical decisions through design docs, white papers, and educational social media platforms.
• Communicates effectively with cross functions; can work well with Product, Design, Analytics, etc, as necessary.
• Proactively identifies problems with requirements (lack of clarity, inconsistencies, technical limitations) for their own work and adjacent work and communicates these issues early to help course-correct.

Required Knowledge / Experience:

• Ability to verify product software requirements considering hardware capabilities.
• Mentor to other engineers in the low level (as FW) or high level (as SW) design and development.
• Able to understand, maintain and create designs for mid-size projects.
• Can provide solutions to complex issues.
• Fluent in product embedded programming C & C#.
• Fluent in low level (as FW) or high level (as SW) development techniques.
• Fluent with software version control.
• TDD Unit test approach.
• Experience with ARM cores / PIC MCU’s.
• Good understanding and skills with CI/CD.
• Solve security / SSDL related issues.
• Able to demonstrate experience with the FW/SW development progress.
• Implementation experience of cryptographic solutions including symmetric & ideally PKI asymmetric.

Education and/or Experience:

• Engineering degree or equivalent or suitable experience.
• Minimum of 7+ years of related industry experience.

Additional beneficial skills/experience:

• Smart Card ISO7816 and RFID ISO 14443/15693 protocols.
• I2C and SPI protocols.
• USB low level protocols.
• Jenkins automation server/client programming.
• NUnit test framework.
• Scripting languages e.g. Python.
• CMock unit testing.
• Windows/Mobile GUI/Application development.
• Design experience with secure elements.

Language Skills:

• Ability to effectively communicate in the English language, both verbally and in writing.
• Ability to read and interpret technical journals, specifications, international technical standards, etc.

Computer Skills:

• Proficient in MS Office applications, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
• Familiar with operating systems, such as Windows, etc.