Principal Embedded Software Engineer

This position offers a roughly 80/20 split between hands-on embedded software development and leadership responsibilities, supporting a small team of 3-5 specialist software engineers. Projects are varied-ranging from short 2-day sprints to full-scale 2-year development programmes-across a wide range of industries.

It's an excellent fit for someone with solid embedded software experience and some exposure toleadership-whether direct orinformal-who's ready to take the next step. A broader understanding of cloud or application-level development is also useful, given the diversity of work.

Location: Commute from Cambridge, Saffron Walden, Newmarket, Braintree, Hitchen, Harlow, St Neots, Bury St Edmunds, Chelmsford (Hybrid, 3 days onsite)
Type: Permanent | Hands-on Technical + Leadership

Other: No Visa sponsorship available

The Opportunity
This is a hands-on role combining software development with team leadership. You'll lead a small, close-knit sub-team within a larger multidisciplinary software group, contributing to the design and delivery of embedded systems for a range of real-world applications-from radar and sensing technologies to IoT devices and advanced communication systems.

Projects span sectors such as defence, healthcare, and industrial innovation, blending embedded software, electronics, FPGA, cloud, and system-level engineering.

As a Lead Software Engineer, your responsibilities will include:

• Line management and mentoring for 3-5 engineers, supporting career development, conducting performance reviews, and assisting with resource planning.
• Technical leadership within multi-disciplinary project teams, including architecture decisions and code contributions.
• Process and practice development across the team, helping shape coding standards, development methodologies, and future technology direction.

What We're Looking For
You'll be a capable and well-rounded embedded software engineer with a natural inclination to guide others. Our ideal candidate brings:

• Strong experience in embedded software development, ideally across environments such as bare metal, RTOS, or embedded Linux.
• Technical depth in areas such as device drivers, DSP, communications protocols, algorithm implementation, or working close to hardware.
• Some leadership exposure-this could be through running small project teams, mentoring, or handling performance reviews.
• Confidence in communicating technical ideas, presenting to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and producing well-reasoned project estimates.
• Ideally, experience in a consultancy or project-based engineering environment, comfortable balancing technical excellence with time and budget constraints.