Senior Bare Metal Engineer Position Overview

Parallel Laboratories is seeking a Senior Bare Metal Engineer to design, develop, debug, and optimize firmware and embedded systems without reliance on operating systems. The ideal candidate will have expert-level low-level programming expertise and hands-on experience working directly with hardware architecture and microcontrollers.

• Develop and maintain bare-metal firmware for embedded systems
• Bring up new hardware platforms from scratch
• Write device drivers and startup code from scratch
• Optimize system performance and memory footprint in resource-constrained environments
• Conduct hardware-level debugging and validation using JTAG/SWD
• Collaborate with hardware, FPGA, and system engineering teams
• Review code and enforce best practices across the firmware team
• Create production-ready firmware, hardware bring-up reports, and technical documentation

Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related field

Experience: 5+ years in embedded systems or bare-metal development; proven experience without operating systems or RTOS abstraction layers; experience bringing up new hardware boards from scratch

Technical Skills:

• Expert-level proficiency in C (mandatory); strong C++ experience (preferred)
• Assembly language experience (ARM, RISC-V, or similar architectures)
• Experience writing linker scripts and startup code
• Deep understanding of microcontrollers (ARM Cortex-M/A, RISC-V, etc.)
• Experience with peripherals (SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, USB, GPIO, DMA, ADC)
• Strong knowledge of memory-mapped I/O and interrupt handling
• Ability to read and interpret hardware datasheets and schematics
• JTAG/SWD debugging experience
• Proficiency with GDB, OpenOCD, logic analyzers, and oscilloscopes
• Cross-compilation toolchains (GCC, Clang); build systems (Make, CMake)
• Bootloaders and startup sequence development
• Low-level memory management and performance optimization
• Power management techniques and CPU architecture knowledge

Soft Skills: Strong problem-solving and analytical abilities; expertise in debugging complex hardware-software interactions; excellent documentation skills; ability to collaborate with hardware engineers; self-driven and independent work capability

Preferred Qualifications: Experience with secure boot and hardware security modules; automotive (AUTOSAR), IoT, or industrial systems experience; FPGA interfacing familiarity; safety standards knowledge (ISO 26262, IEC 61508); silicon bring-up experience