Staff Firmware Software Development Engineer, SI Hardware

As a Staff Software Development Engineer on this team, you willhelp shapethe safety, security, and reliability foundations for Tesla’s next-generation system-on-chip platforms. You willoperateacross the entire silicon lifecycle - from pre-silicon emulation and FPGA validation to high-volume production bring-up and deployment at scale. You will architect and implement mission-critical systems including secure boot flows, over-the-air firmware updates, failover mechanisms, low-latency RTOS scheduling, and tightly coupled peripheral management. You will collaborate closely with ASIC, hardware, and architecture teams on co-design, defining register interfaces, memory maps, and firmware requirements from the earliest stages of chip definition.This is a high-impact staff-level role for an exceptional engineer who thrives on solving the hardest problems in safety-critical embedded systems and wants to see their code running in vehicles on the road, robots in factories, and SI superclusters at unprecedented scale. What You’ll Do

• Own firmware architecture for critical SoC subsystems; author high-quality design documents and lead technical design reviews
• Design and implement secure boot, hardware root-of-trust, firmware update mechanisms, and robust failover architectures
• Develop high-reliability, safety-critical firmware in C, C++, and Rust for bare-metal and RTOS environments, meeting the strictest functional safety and security standards
• Drive hardware/firmware co-design efforts with ASIC and hardware teams - define register interfaces, memory maps, interrupts, and performance requirements during early chip architecture
• Own firmware through the complete silicon lifecycle: pre-silicon simulation/emulation, FPGA bring-up, first silicon validation, and high-volume production flows
• Debug complex issues at the hardware level using JTAG, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, protocol analyzers, and other low-level tools
• Architect and develop factory test, provisioning, calibration, and diagnostic firmware for Tesla’s high-volume manufacturing lines
• Mentor senior and staff firmware engineers, raise the bar on code quality, testing, and engineering excellence across the team
• Champion test-driven development, automated testing infrastructure, and continuous improvement of our firmware validation suites
• Leverage and championstate-of-the-artSI tooling (including Grok and others) to dramatically accelerate development velocity, improve code quality, and increase team productivity

• 6+ years of deepproficiencywriting production firmware in C for bare-metal or RTOS environments, including strong low-level experience with ARM and/or RISC-V architectures (register-level programming, MMU,caches, exceptions, etc.)
• Hands-on experience with at least one RTOS (FreeRTOS, Zephyr,ThreadX, or similar) and low-level subsystems such as cryptography, filesystems, device drivers, secure boot, and firmware update mechanisms
• Practicalexperience with functional safety standards (ISO 26262, IEC 61508), security standards (FIPS 140, Common Criteria), and debugging embedded systems at the hardware level (JTAG, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, protocol analyzers)
• Directexperience taking silicon designs from pre-silicon emulation/FPGA through bring-up, validation, and high-volume production
• Proficiencydeveloping embedded systems in Rustpreferred, familiarity with MISRA C or equivalent safety-critical coding standards, and experience with embedded communication protocols (CAN, Ethernet, SPI, I2C, MIPI, PCIe, etc.)
• Experience with factory test, provisioning, calibration firmware, serialization frameworks (protocol buffers, CBOR, etc.),open sourceembedded/firmware contributions, anddemonstrateduse of modern SI tools (Grok, Claude, Copilot, etc.) preferred
• Degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent in experience and evidence of exceptional ability