Join Cirrus Real Estate GmbH as an Embedded Software Engineer, where you will develop high-performance, reliable firmware for DSP and microcontroller architectures. You'll design and implement real-time embedded software, optimize compute-heavy pipelines, and collaborate with hardware and systems teams to bring products from concept to production. This role is ideal for someone proficient in low-level firmware development, performance tuning, and who thrives in an environment where latency, throughput, power, and determinism are critical.
What You'll Do
- Design, implement, and maintain embedded firmware for DSP cores and MCUs (RISC V and/or Arm).
- Build and optimize real-time signal-processing pipelines, including FFTs, filters, modulation/demodulation, codecs, feature extraction, or control loops.
- Develop firmware primarily in C/C++, with selective assembly where appropriate, focusing on performance, memory, and power optimization.
- Work with SoC/board peripherals such as DMA, timers, SPI, I²C, UART, I²S/TDM, PWM, GPIO, and relevant bus fabrics.
- Bring up new hardware, handling boot flows, clocks, memory maps, interrupt vectors, peripheral initialization, and early validation.
- Implement and debug drivers and RTOS components, including task scheduling, synchronization primitives, and ISR design.
- Develop test strategies, including unit tests, hardware-in-the-loop tests, test automation, and manufacturing diagnostics.
- Use debugging and profiling tools like JTAG/SWD, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and trace tools.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with hardware, FPGA/ASIC, systems, and application teams to define requirements and interfaces.
- Contribute technical documentation such as architecture notes, interface specs, timing budgets, and bring-up guides.
- Participate in code reviews and help establish best practices for embedded quality, safety, and maintainability.
What We're Looking For
- Strong professional experience developing embedded firmware in C/C++ for MCUs and/or DSPs.
- Hands-on experience with RISC V and/or Arm architecture (Cortex M/A), including interrupts, memory, caches, and performance characteristics.
- Solid understanding of embedded software fundamentals: register-level programming, memory-mapped I/O, concurrency (ISRs, RTOS tasks), race conditions, timing determinism, fixed-point arithmetic, numerical precision, and overflow/underflow management.
- Proven ability to optimize firmware through cycle counting, memory layout, DMA usage, cache behavior, and minimizing latency and jitter.
- Comfortable with toolchains and build systems, including GCC/LLVM-based toolchains, cross-compilation, CMake/Make, Meson, linker scripts, and map files.
- Strong debugging skills with hardware and firmware, including JTAG/SWD debugging and root-cause analysis of timing and performance issues.
- Source control expertise with Git and disciplined engineering practices such as code reviews and continuous integration.
Nice to Have
- Experience with common DSP libraries/techniques and SIMD/vector optimization patterns.
- Experience with Zephyr or embedded Linux on Arm.
- Familiarity with bootloaders, secure boot, OTA update mechanisms, and field diagnostics.
- Understanding of digital communications or audio processing domains.
- Exposure to safety/security standards such as MISRA C/C++, IEC 61508, or ISO 26262.
Technical Stack
- Languages: C, C++, Assembly, Python
- Architectures: RISC V, Arm Cortex M/A, DSP cores
- RTOS/OS: Zephyr, embedded Linux
- Tools: GCC/LLVM, CMake/Make, Meson, Git, JTAG/SWD, GDB, OpenOCD/J-Link, logic analyzer, oscilloscope, trace tools
Work Mode
This role offers a hybrid work arrangement, with offices in Newbury and London.
At Cirrus Logic, we believe that diversity drives innovation, and we are committed to encouraging an open and collaborative culture where different approaches, ideas, and points of view are respected and valued. We aim to promote a workplace where everyone can contribute irrespective of race, colour, national origin, religion or belief, gender or gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, pregnancy status, or disability.
