Principal Firmware Engineer

Team and role overview

Security firmware delivery

• Architect, design, and implement security firmware components, including driver interfaces, bring-up, and security feature development.
• Deliver features end to end from design through production.
• Apply Security Development Lifecycle practices with a quality-first, test-driven development mindset.

Debugging and collaboration

• Perform system-level debugging and troubleshooting of complex hardware and firmware issues.
• Collaborate with hardware architects, engineers, software developers, validation teams, integration teams, and product managers.
• Work with product groups, industry partners, and researchers to develop server hardware solutions for Azure cloud platforms.
• Track cloud firmware technology trends and provide recommendations for improvement.

Education and experience

• A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electronics Engineering, or a related field is required.
• The role requires 12 or more years of professional experience in firmware, multicore embedded software, or hardware and firmware security.
• The role requires 10 or more years of programming experience in C, C++, and/or Rust.
• Experience with architecture, design, and coding for solutions at scale is required.

Firmware and systems expertise

• Experience with SoC bring-up, security primitives, bootloaders, platform initialization, board support package porting, and peripherals such as PCIe, I2C, SPI, USB, and UARTs.
• Experience with operating system primitives, memory management, scheduling, interrupts, and multithreading is required.
• Experience with secure boot, secure firmware updates, attestation, secure recovery, and secure debug workflows at scale is required.
• A solid understanding of processors, buses, memory systems, and computer architectures is required.

Professional capabilities

• Experience resolving complex hardware and firmware interface issues through root-cause analysis, troubleshooting, and debugging is required.
• The role requires problem-solving, analytical, independent prioritization, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Preferred qualifications

• Security-related certifications or qualifications are preferred.
• Experience with secure communications, cryptographic algorithms, public key infrastructure, and key management is preferred.
• Familiarity with supply chain security, firmware vulnerability assessment, and penetration testing is preferred.
• Experience with security primitives, cryptographic ciphers, threat vectors, mitigation strategies, RTOS scheduling, or multithreaded SMP and heterogeneous systems is preferred.