Firmware Engineer

About ZELP

ZELP is an agricultural technology company committed to creating a sustainable future for agriculture - one that meets the needs of present and future generations, promoting human and environmental health, animal welfare, and social and economic equity.

Our first focus is to develop and scale technology that measures and mitigates methane emissions in the livestock industry. Today, 1.3 billion people rely on the industry for their livelihoods and food security. However, it is the single biggest human-driven source of methane emissions globally, emitting more than both the oil & gas industry and the coal industry.

The deployment of our technologies on a global scale has the potential to drive half the global methane reduction needed by 2030, and to greatly transform the beef and dairy industries.

ZELP was an inaugural winner of the Terra Carta Design Lab, and has received funding and support from the European Commission, Innovate UK, The Global Methane Hub and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

About the role

PLEASE ONLY APPLY IF YOU HAVE 4+ YEARS OF EXPERIENCE. THIS IS NOT A ENTRY LEVEL ROLE.

ZELP is looking for an experienced and proactive Embedded Firmware Engineer (Intermediate Level) to join our hardware engineering team. At ZELP you will be utilising cutting-edge technologies and best practices within a high-performance team, where you will collaborate in the development of wearable devices which aim to monitor and reduce methane emissions from cattle farming. Reporting to the Head of Hardware, you will play a key role in designing and creating high quality firmware for our embedded systems running on MCUs/MPUs to optimize for high efficiency, low power consumption, and communicating wirelessly to our cloud infrastructure. Your role will also include writing business logic using hierarchical state machines, unit tests, preparing automated build systems, bootloader updates, and version management using a CD/CI infrastructure. 

The role at ZELP is incredibly varied and the candidate will be exposed to many elements of modern embedded firmware development, learn from experienced engineers, all while contributing to projects with a potentially massive positive global impact.

Primary responsibilities

Your main duties will include:

• Task planning, prioritization, proactive monitoring and compliance with scheduled delivery dates.


• Learning the current system architecture for the wearable devices and their companion applications.


• Integration and maintenance of software libraries developed by external parties.


• Contribute with writing device drivers, firmware features for an event driven architecture, hierarchical state machines logic, refactoring, power optimisation, performing bug fixes and maintaining ZELP’s cloud infrastructure.


• Creating unit tests for the device firmware as it is continually developed.


• Writing clear source code documentation to explain the code’s functionality.


• Development and support of software for hardware programming, verification and calibration for mass production.

Requirements

• 4+ years of experience in software development for embedded systems in C/C++ with proficiency in Git and a scripting language.


• Peripheral configuration, coding and debugging experience of ARM Cortex M processors running bare metal and on a RTOS.


• Experience with Radios and wireless protocols: BLE, WiFi, LoRa, NFC, Zigbee, etc.


• Experience in network communications and IOT: UDP/TCP/IP, HTTP, REST, MQTT.


• Experience with electronic communication standards: RS232, I2C, SPI, USB, etc.


• Experience with product testing harness and documentation.


• Experience developing PC apps to interact with hardware.

Plus experience with the following would be a bonus

• Zephyr OS development and debugging experience is highly desirable.


• C# Visual Studio programming experience.


• Linux environment experience – Bash/Python scripting, compilation.


• NI LabView for quick prototyping, lab testing and building test harnesses.


• Experience with RISK-V processors.


• Exposure to Test Driven Development.


• Build automation to create version-controlled production firmware releases (i.e. Jira/GitHub actions).


• Embedded Linux experience, Kernel cross-compilation for ARM Cortex A processors, DT, U-boot, driver development.


• Experience with product compliance (RED/CE/FCC) - testing, documentation, certification.

Interview Process

1. Introductory Call


2. Technical interview


3. Offer