Senior Firmware Design Engineer

About the role

AheadComputing is hiring a Senior Firmware Design Engineer to work on its proprietary CPU designs. The engineer spends 100% of their working time writing low-level firmware and device drivers in C/C++ and assembly for bare-metal and pre-OS environments on RISC-V processors, and works closely with CPU architecture and RTL design teams.

Key responsibilities

• Architect, develop and maintain low-level firmware and device drivers in C/C++ and assembly for bare-metal and pre-OS execution environments on RISC-V platforms, defining module boundaries, HAL interfaces and initialization sequencing.
• Write production-quality firmware for CPU bring-up, power management, system initialization, diagnostics and hardware debug.
• Define firmware interfaces for custom CPU features and collaborate with architecture and RTL teams on custom instruction sets, CSRs and memory-mapped I/O.
• Design, implement and validate bootloaders, ROM initialization and platform bring-up code, including DRAM training, and optimize boot performance and runtime behavior.
• Support pre-silicon validation through hardware verification, RTL simulation and FPGA emulation, and post-silicon lab bring-up, failure analysis and root cause analysis.
• Implement security-critical firmware features such as secure boot, hardware root-of-trust, key provisioning and trusted firmware components (about 15% of the role).

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science or a closely related field.
• Three years of post-baccalaureate professional experience developing low-level device drivers and infrastructure firmware for SoC, CPU and/or GPU emulation platforms in C/C++, targeting pre-silicon environments.
• Experience applying RISC-based assembly knowledge, performing hardware model bring-up and debug, configuring memory-mapped I/O peripherals and initializing DRAM.
• Experience documenting firmware design decisions and collaborating with hardware engineering and architecture teams.

Required skills

• C/C++ and assembly programming
• Memory-mapped I/O and DRAM initialization
• Build systems such as Make and CMake
• Version control with Git or Perforce
• GDB-based debugging and JTAG tools such as OpenOCD and Lauterbach

What we offer

• Competitive salary and benefits package
• Professional growth opportunities in an innovative startup environment
• Collaboration with engineers focused on cutting-edge CPU technologies