Embedded Audio Firmware Engineer (DSP)

Location: Newbury, England; hybrid work with 2+ days per week in the office. Candidates must be within commuting distance or willing to relocate to the United Kingdom before starting employment.

Company

hirify.global develops audio technologies used in smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and maintain embedded firmware for DSP cores using C/C++ and selective assembly.
• Design, simulate, characterize, and optimize audio and sensor signal-processing algorithms for custom hardware and DSP constraints.
• Optimize fixed-point firmware for cycle count, memory usage, DMA, cache behavior, power, latency, and jitter.
• Develop unit tests, test harnesses, laboratory setups, and manufacturing diagnostics.
• Collaborate with chip design, applications, systems, and marketing teams to define requirements and interfaces.
• Bring up new hardware, including boot flows, clocks, memory maps, interrupt vectors, peripheral initialization, and early validation.

Requirements

• Degree or equivalent experience in electronics, embedded software, signal processing, or a related discipline.
• Strong professional experience developing embedded firmware in C/C++ for fixed-point and floating-point DSPs and embedded platforms.
• Ability to translate Matlab algorithm designs into embedded C/C++ firmware.
• Knowledge of filter design, adaptive filtering, audio or sensor signal processing, FFT/spectral processing, and embedded software fundamentals.
• Experience with register-level programming, memory-mapped I/O, ISRs, RTOS tasks, concurrency, timing determinism, fixed-point arithmetic, and numerical precision.
• Experience with GCC/LLVM toolchains, cross-compilation, CMake/Make or Meson, linker scripts, Git, code reviews, and CI.

Nice to have

• Experience with Synopsys or Tensilica HiFi DSP cores and DSP libraries such as CMSIS-DSP.
• Experience with Python, TCL, PowerShell, or Groovy for test tooling and scripting.
• Experience with JTAG/SWD, GDB, OpenOCD/J-Link, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and trace tools.
• Experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow, including implementing machine-learning models on fixed-point embedded platforms or DSP cores.
• Experience with SIMD/vector optimization, Jenkins CI/CD, and unit or integration testing.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working with at least 2 in-office days per week, based on business needs and team preference.
• Cross-functional collaboration across hardware, systems, applications, chip design, and marketing teams.
• Opportunity to contribute to new intellectual property, methodologies, and embedded software best practices.
• Involvement in products from early concept through production readiness.