Embedded Systems Engineer

Opteran is hiring an Embedded Systems Engineer.

An exciting opportunity to join Opteran's Platform Team where we design and build custom hardware and software systems that are the foundation of the company's technology stack. Working to continuously evolve and respond to the latest research and customer requirements, the work is varied and challenging. This role offers ample opportunity to learn and contribute new ideas, helping to shape the technology of tomorrow.

**What you will be doing in your first 6-12 months

• Design, develop, and implement embedded software for microcontrollers, microprocessors, and other embedded systems
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including research, robotics engineers, and integration
• Develop using modern DevOps practices, code reviews, unit testing, and CI/CD
• Participate in the entire product development lifecycle, from requirements gathering to deployment and maintenance
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other team members - we learn and grow together

What we are doing

The Platform Team is laying the foundations for the rest of Opteran’s software stack to work on. We create firmware for custom pieces of hardware, connect everything to SBCs, create and adopt device drivers, then prepare Linux OS images and/or tweak distributions for others to integrate over. We deal with Linux, RTOS and FPGA on a daily basis, they communicate with each other using I²C, MIPI CSI-2, SPI and other protocols. We learn a lot every day and open doors not yet opened as we’re ahead of the widely available state of technology. We’re driven by Linux and we only use Linux for our day-to-day work.

The Company

After 8 years of research, Opteran has pioneered brain biomimicry - the ability to understand real brains and re-engineer them. Starting with how insect brains see, avoid collisions, navigate and make decisions, reproducing these biological systems so efficiently they run on low-end silicon to enable machines to behave more naturally. Providing an alternative to current photogrammetry and DL approaches, this has broken through today's limitations; not only is it small, lightweight and ultra-low powered, it is orders of magnitude more robust and is also verifiable, is edge only and does not require data. We call it ‘natural intelligence’.

**The Person:

Required:

• Day-to-day experience working with Linux systems, Linux is the primary development OS, our integration targets are Linux-based
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Proficient in programming languages such as C, modern C++ (17 onward), Bash / scripting
• Minimum 3 years experience working with low-level compute, devices and custom hardware
• Knowledge of modern development practices
• Experience working with version control systems (Git & GitHub)
• Experience with bare metal / RTOS microcontrollers (FreeRTOS, Zephyr)
• Experience in using common test frameworks (Google Test or similar)

Desired:

• Previous experience of vision/camera based systems
• Experience working on product in the field
• Experience creating custom Linux OS (Yocto, OpenEmbedded, Debootstrap, Packer)
• Understanding of common embedded communication protocols and devices, USB, I²C, SPI, Ethernet, CAN, MIPI
• Experience in Linux Kernel Programming or V4L2 subsystem
• Exposure to ROS2 in C++
• Previous exposure to Rust
• Experience in Cross Compilation

Bonus:

• Knowledge operating in a common electronics lab environment (power supplies, oscilloscopes, logic analyser, reading schematics, soldering etc)
• Experience of FPGAs and Hardware development
• Experience of alternative computing architectures (DSP, GPU)
• Experience designing/architecting custom hardware solutions
• Exposure to creating Debian packages

Benefits:

• 25 days holiday per year (plus 8 UK public holidays)
• Eligible for our employee equity scheme
• Flexible working hours
• Team socials
• Salary sacrifice and 5% employee contribution to the company pension scheme
• Bank holiday swaps
• Cycle to work scheme

If you are keen on joining this exciting, forward-thinking company and taking the next step in your career, then please click the apply now button to find out more.

Research shows that women and minority groups are particularly likely to second-guess themselves and not apply — so if you're worried about meeting all of the criteria, get in touch anyhow and let us do the worrying.