How to hire embedded software and electronics engineers

What the role is for

Describe the product and the layer first. The same title can mean writing drivers for a new board, building application features on a connected device, designing the circuit itself or verifying a design before it goes to manufacture. Most hires in this area fall into one of these situations:

• A new product needs its first working hardware and software, and the team needs someone who can bring up a board and get it talking to the rest of the system.
• An existing product needs new features, better power use or more reliable behaviour, and the team needs someone comfortable with code that cannot simply be patched in production.
• A design needs to move from prototype to manufacture, which brings in testing, certification and the practical limits of components and cost.
• A team has grown and needs someone to lead the embedded or electronics work, set standards and mentor others.

Write down what working looks like after six months: “the new board runs our firmware and passes its test plan”, or “battery life meets the product target”. That outcome is what strong candidates want to know, and it tells you which discipline you actually need.

Where embedded, firmware, electronics and FPGA roles divide

These roles share tools and vocabulary, and on small teams one person sometimes covers two of them. The table shows the usual boundaries, as a starting point for the brief.

Test, verification and hardware-in-the-loop engineers sit alongside all of these. If a role mixes disciplines, for example firmware with some board design, state the balance in the brief so candidates can judge their fit.

Essential skills and what can be learned

Embedded briefs often narrow the field by naming the exact parts and tools in use. Most of that is learnable. The fundamentals are not.

Usually essential for embedded software and firmware

• Strong C, or C++ written with care for memory and timing, on resource-constrained devices.
• Working knowledge of microcontroller architecture: interrupts, memory, peripherals and power modes.
• Debugging on real hardware with a debugger, oscilloscope or logic analyser.
• Reading schematics and datasheets well enough to know whether a fault is in the code or the board.
• Experience with the common serial interfaces devices use to talk to sensors and to each other.
• Version control, code review and testing habits, including testing on the target hardware.

Usually essential for electronics design

• Analogue and digital circuit design and schematic capture in a recognised design tool.
• Component selection with an eye on cost, supply and manufacture.
• Bench work: bringing up new boards, measuring, and fixing what the measurements show.
• Designing with testing and compliance in mind, so a board can be certified and built reliably.

Usually trainable

• A specific microcontroller family, processor or real-time operating system, when the candidate knows a comparable one well.
• A particular design tool, toolchain or test framework.
• Your product domain, standards process and internal conventions.

Domain experience deserves care. Where the product is safety-critical or regulated, experience of working to that discipline can be genuinely essential. Elsewhere, requiring a specific industry background shuts out engineers whose skills transfer well.

Why embedded and electronics roles can be hard to fill

• The work needs both software discipline and hardware understanding, and fewer people have both than either alone.
• Experienced engineers are usually attached to products they want to see through, so they move for a specific reason rather than in response to a general advert.
• Many roles add a further requirement, such as a regulated industry, low-power design or radio, which narrows the field again.
• Hardware work often needs time in a lab, which limits how far a role can be remote and so how wide the search can go.

Time to hire depends mostly on how many of those narrowing requirements are truly essential, how realistic the location and working pattern are for lab-based work, and how quickly you move once you meet someone suitable. Being clear about which days need to be on site often widens the field more than any other single change.

Salary and package: what moves it

Pay varies with the discipline, the level of ownership, any specialist area such as safety-critical work or radio, location and how much of the role needs to be on site. Published averages for embedded and electronics roles mix very different jobs, so treat them with caution.

Before advertising, check the range against the specific profile you need. Our salary benchmarking service builds that comparison around your role. Beyond salary, engineers in this field often weigh the product itself, the quality of the lab and equipment, and the chance to see a design through to production.

How to assess embedded and electronics engineers

Assessments work when they look like the job. A process that respects the candidate's time usually includes:

• A walk-through of a product they shipped: the hardware, the constraints, a difficult fault and how they found it.
• A short exercise on real material, such as reviewing a piece of firmware, reading part of a schematic or a datasheet, or reasoning about a timing or power problem.
• For electronics design, a discussion of one of their own boards: the choices they made, what failed on the bench and what they changed.
• Time with the hardware and the people they would work with, ideally in the lab.

General algorithm puzzles say little about embedded ability, and long take-home projects put off the people in good jobs. Decide in advance what a strong answer looks like at each stage, so the decision rests on the work rather than on impressions.

Why good candidates drop out

• A role described as embedded development that turns out to be mostly test or support work, or the reverse.
• No chance to see the product, the lab or the equipment they would use.
• Interviewers who cannot talk about the hardware in any depth.
• On-site expectations that only become clear late in the process.
• A slow process while another employer makes an offer.

Showing the product and the lab early, and being straight about the mix of design, test and support work, keeps most strong candidates engaged.

Adjacent backgrounds worth considering

• Software engineers with C or C++ experience in systems, networking or performance-sensitive code, who want to move closer to hardware.
• Electronics engineers who have written firmware for their own boards and want to make software their main work.
• Test and verification engineers with strong scripting and hardware knowledge, for roles weighted towards testing on target.
• Graduates and researchers from electronics, physics or instrumentation backgrounds who have built and programmed their own hardware.

Each brings part of the role. Say which gaps you are prepared to train, and pair the person with someone experienced for the first months.

Permanent, contract or leadership search

Contract engineers suit defined pieces of work: bringing up a new board, a certification push, a particular driver or cover during a product deadline. Permanent engineers suit ongoing ownership of a product and the knowledge that grows with it. Our contract or permanent guide sets out how to decide, and the contract recruitment and permanent recruitment pages explain how each works with us.

For a head of electronics, head of embedded software or a similar leadership role, the search is smaller, often confidential and weighted towards how the person has built and led teams. That is usually a retained leadership search.

What a strong brief contains

• The product and the layer: what the person will build, and where it sits between the circuit and the application.
• The six-month outcome, in a sentence.
• The hardware and tools in use, marked as essential or learnable.
• Any regulated or safety-critical discipline the work follows.
• The balance of design, test and support work.
• The team, the lab and who they report to.
• Which days need to be on site, the location and the salary range.
• The interview stages, including any time with the hardware.

Our hiring brief builder walks through these points and shows where a brief is likely to narrow the field.

When specialist recruitment support is useful

If your adverts already bring strong, relevant applicants, you may not need help. Specialist support is more useful when the person you need is not looking, when the role combines disciplines, when it carries a specialist requirement, or when you need to test whether the brief matches the market before committing to it.

Humand recruits embedded software, firmware and electronics engineers for technology employers across Oxfordshire and the UK, as part of our deep tech recruitment work. Our electronics recruitment page sets out the roles we cover.