Firmware Engineer: IoT & Embedded Systems

Company Description Utah Tech Labs (UTL) specializes in digital transformation, helping organizations become autonomous enterprises and realize their digital vision. The company delivers technology services and products that position IT as a strategic asset rather than a cost center. UTL focuses on long-term business success by addressing challenges in automation, service management, and operations. Team members work with forward-looking technologies and methodologies designed to support innovation and scalability.

Overview

This role involves end-to-end firmware development for IoT and IIoT products across consumer safety, industrial monitoring, and wearable applications. The engineer works at the intersection of embedded hardware and networked systems, and is expected to take ownership of firmware modules from specification through deployment.

Embedded software developers with an interest in the IoT and networking are well suited for this role.

Responsibilities

Firmware Development

• Design and implement modular firmware on STM32, ESP32, and nRF52 platforms.
• Develop and integrate wireless communication stacks: BLE, LoRa, Wi-Fi, and LTE with wired protocols (UART, SPI, I2C).
• Implement low-power strategies including sleep modes, power gating, and duty-cycling for battery-powered devices.
• Build and maintain FOTA (Firmware Over-the-Air) pipelines for dual-MCU and single-MCU architectures.
• Low level code and architecting: example: custom transport-layer protocols for reliable packet delivery over lossy wireless links.

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Review schematics with hardware designers; provide firmware-level design-for-manufacture feedback.
• Define and maintain API contracts with mobile-app and backend teams for sensor data exchange and device control.
• Coordinate with international OEMs and vendors for component selection, bringup, and integration.
• Lead / participate in client-facing technical calls to translate requirements into firmware specifications.

Debugging

• Debug across the full stack: hardware (oscilloscope, logic analyzer), firmware (J-Link, ST-Link, ESP-Prog), and protocol (MQTT, BLE sniffer).
• Identify and resolve issues in multi-device systems including gateways, beacons, and cloud endpoints.
• Validate sensor dataflow: end-to-end across hardware, firmware, and application layers.

Documentation & Handoff

• Maintain clear technical documentation: firmware architecture, protocol specs, and bringup guides.
• Conduct structured knowledge transfer for projects transitioning between engineers.

Technical Requirements

The following table summarizes most of the knowledge (tools and skills). Broad knowledge of the IoT Landscape is welcome. In depth knowledge is expected from core embedded and electrical engineering subjects. Requirements highlighted in yellow are bare minimum.

Note that concurrency is a must because in our IoT projects we build systems with responsive UIs which almost always need high priority threads.

Knowledge of either the ESP-IDF or NRF Connect SDK is a plus.