Lead Embedded Software Engineer – Gloucestershire

Wotton under Edge / Hybrid (3 days office based) up to £60,000 depending on experience.

Renishaw’s Encoder Products Division (EPD) designs and supplies cutting-edge position feedback technology to the world’s precision measurement, automation, and manufacturing industries. EPD is made up of engineers, scientists and technicians all working together to produce market leading products for sale around the world. We start with cutting edge optical, algorithm and circuit design, developing our own ASICs and sensors where required; we then use innovative mechanical engineering to turn our core technology into a range of desirable products for our broad customer base.

We’re looking for a Lead Embedded Software Engineer to take technical ownership of the firmware in our high-performance sensor and encoder products. This is a hands‑on role combining architecture and delivery leadership with day‑to‑day embedded development, debugging, and verification on real hardware. Our systems are typically bare‑metal and real‑time, and in some products the MCU works alongside an FPGA.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and deliver hands‑on embedded firmware development for real‑time, bare‑metal MCU‑based products from early prototypes through to production and long‑term support.
• Own and develop firmware architecture and design, including timing strategy, interrupt design, resource/memory budgets, interface definitions, test strategy approach, and maintainability over the product lifecycle.
• Develop and maintain firmware that interfaces effectively with FPGA‑based subsystems, collaborating with FPGA/RTL teams on partitioning, interfaces, timing, data movement, and validation of MCU–FPGA interactions.
• Drive capture, refinement, and traceability of requirements, translating high‑level user expectations into implementable firmware requirements and verifiable behaviour.
• Understand, evaluate, and implement embedded algorithms on MCU targets with a focus on performance, accuracy, determinism, numerical robustness, and repeatable behaviour.
• Optimise for power, performance, and determinism, applying power‑aware design techniques to reduce system consumption without sacrificing performance.
• Set engineering direction and maintain high standards through design reviews, code reviews, coding standards, and pragmatic best practice adoption.
• Define verification and validation strategy across unit, integration, and system‑level testing.
• Support functional safety certification where required, contributing to safety lifecycle activities.
• Produce and maintain clear documentation suitable for long‑term product maintenance.
• Mentor and support engineers, especially graduates/apprentices.

Essential Requirements:

• Strong, demonstrable experience in modern C for embedded systems.
• Proven experience designing and maintaining embedded firmware architectures for MCU‑based products.
• In‑depth understanding of ARM microcontroller architectures.
• Solid experience with bare‑metal real‑time firmware development and debugging on real hardware.
• Practical experience building reliable firmware around serial/low‑level communication protocols.
• Experience with build systems and developer tooling.
• Experience writing and maintaining unit tests and designing code for testability.
• Demonstrable ability to design for power in embedded systems.
• Strong grasp of software quality principles.
• Clear written and verbal communication.
• Degree in engineering/computer science (or equivalent practical experience).

Desirable Requirements:

• Experience working on products where an FPGA is part of the system.
• Familiarity with functional safety development and/or supporting products through certification.