Senior Software Engineer - Embedded Security & Real-Time Firmware

About the role

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a publicly funded research institute in Abu Dhabi, UAE, is hiring a Senior Software Engineer specializing in embedded security and real-time firmware. You will design, implement and maintain the embedded software of a physical tamper-detection system that detects and responds to intrusion on PCBs, working with low-power MCUs to protect cryptographic material and mission integrity. The role is a senior individual contributor within a multidisciplinary team of hardware, security, manufacturing and certification engineers, with responsibility for mentoring junior engineers.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and maintain real-time firmware in C/C++ on ARM Cortex-M MCUs under Zephyr, optimized for ultra-low-power, always-on operation in battery-backed power domains.
• Implement secure boot chains (e.g. MCUboot), signed firmware images and secure update mechanisms.
• Implement on-device cryptographic key management: provisioning, storage in hardware-protected domains and zeroization of keys and sensitive data on tamper events.
• Develop tamper-response logic: event latching, tamper-evident logging, anti-rollback, secure debug control and lifecycle-state enforcement.
• Build sensor acquisition pipelines (ADC interfacing, sampling strategies, drivers) and apply DSP techniques such as digital filtering, spectral analysis and feature extraction.
• Develop and tune event-detection and classification algorithms that separate genuine tamper events from noise and vibration, and support data-collection campaigns.
• Bring up SoC/MCU platforms (NXP and NVIDIA) and integrate firmware with hosts via UART, SPI, I2C, CAN and network interfaces.
• Contribute to threat modeling, vulnerability assessments and secure-coding reviews, and produce evidence supporting certification against ISO/IEC 19790, FIPS 140 and Common Criteria.
• Deliver tested firmware through CI/CD pipelines with unit, integration and hardware-in-the-loop tests, and mentor junior engineers.

Required profile

• 5-8 years of professional embedded software development, with firmware shipped through integration, test and production, preferably in defense, aerospace or security-critical products.
• BSc or MSc in Electrical/Electronic Engineering, Computer Science, Embedded Systems or a related field.
• Experience implementing embedded security features such as secure boot, signed firmware, hardware root of trust, TEE concepts, key provisioning and zeroization, and encrypted communications.
• Experience with SoC platform bring-up (NXP and/or NVIDIA) and low-power design; Linux/Yocto familiarity is a plus.
• Strong English and the ability to work with hardware, security, manufacturing, QA and systems teams under pressure.

Required skills

• C/C++ on ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers, with real-time, interrupt-driven and memory-constrained design.
• Zephyr RTOS or a comparable RTOS (FreeRTOS, ThreadX); Zephyr specialization is encouraged.
• DSP and sensor signal processing: ADC interfacing, digital filtering, spectral analysis, feature extraction and anomaly detection.
• Git, CI/CD, automated testing and HIL test setups; Docker is a plus.