Job Description

Most firmware jobs ask you to keep the lights on.
This one asks you to push the limits of what silicon can actually do.

You’ll be joining a small, senior-heavy engineering group building next-generation embedded systems where every microamp, every cycle and every byte matters. It’s the kind of work where you can’t hide behind abstraction — you’re operating close to the metal, solving problems that don’t have a Stack Overflow answer, and shaping the behaviour of hardware that didn’t exist a few years ago.

If you want to work somewhere that feels like an engineering lab rather than a product maintenance shop, read on.

What you’ll be doing

• Building and optimising firmware in C for constrained, real-time systems
• Working across RTOS internals: bootloaders, startup code, scheduling, drivers, interrupts, DMA
• Bringing up new boards and SoCs on ARM Cortex or RISC-V architectures
• Writing deterministic, testable code for SPI, I²C, SDIO and other hardware interfaces
• Solving real engineering puzzles — performance, memory, timing, data movement
• Collaborating with silicon, digital, systems and hardware engineers to debug cross-layer issues
• Owning problems end-to-end: from concept to design, implementation and validation on real hardware

What they’re looking for

You’re someone who enjoys thinking deeply about how things work under the hood — not just writing code that compiles, but code that is predictable, efficient and clear.

You’ll thrive here if you have:

• 5+ years in embedded firmware development using C
• Experience with FreeRTOS, RT-Thread, ThreadX, Zephyr or a similar RTOS
• Hands-on bring-up of ARM Cortex or RISC-V systems
• Strong familiarity with interrupt handlers, DMA, low-level drivers and timing constraints
• Solid knowledge of SPI, I²C, SDIO and related protocols
• The ability to reason about state machines, data structures and algorithmic complexity — you care about correctness as much as functionality
• A degree in EE/CE/Comms/CS or equivalent practical depth

Bonus points (not required):

• Experience with secure embedded systems or networking stacks
• Firmware for complex SoCs or semiconductor environments

Why this team stands out
Because they’ve built the kind of engineering environment people don’t leave easily.

• Real engineering culture.
• Hard problems, not maintenance work.
• You get space to think.
• Potential visa sponsorship + relocation support if you’re coming from overseas and are eligible for a working holiday visa.
• Work from anywhere in the world for 10 days a year
• Little things that actually make a difference like free barista-made coffee every day (yes, the proper stuff — and yes, it really does save you ~$1,500 a year).
• The team’s average tenure is 3 years, which is unusually strong for a deep-tech company of 200+ employees in Australia.

If you’re the kind of firmware engineer who likes solving hard problems, not repeating easy ones, let’s talk.

Reach out to Thaís Amorim at The Onset: thais@theonset.com.au.