Lead and deliver hands-on embedded firmware development for real-time, bare-metal MCU-based products from early prototypes through to production and long-term support.
Own and develop firmware architecture and design, including timing strategy, interrupt design, resource/memory budgets, interface definitions, test strategy approach, and maintainability over the product lifecycle.
Develop and maintain firmware that interfaces effectively with FPGA-based subsystems, collaborating with FPGA/RTL teams on partitioning, interfaces, timing, data movement, and validation of MCU-FPGA interactions.
Drive capture, refinement, and traceability of requirements, working closely with systems, electronics, algorithms, FPGA/RTL, and test teams - translating high-level user expectations into implementable firmware requirements and verifiable behaviour.
Understand, evaluate, and implement embedded algorithms on MCU targets with a focus on performance, accuracy, determinism, numerical robustness, and repeatable behaviour. Algorithm improvements are encouraged, but the day-to-day focus is reliable implementation.
Optimise for power, performance, and determinism, applying power-aware design techniques (sleep states, peripheral gating, DMA strategies, interrupt minimisation, timing/throughput trade-offs) to reduce system consumption without sacrificing performance.
Set engineering direction and maintain high standards through design reviews, code reviews, coding standards, and pragmatic best practice adoption.
Define verification and validation strategy across unit, integration, and system-level testing (including testability hooks, diagnostics, and hardware-in-the-loop approaches where appropriate).
Support functional safety certification where required, contributing to safety lifecycle activities such as safety requirements, design constraints, traceability, verification planning, and producing audit-quality evidence.
Produce and maintain clear documentation: architecture, interfaces, design rationale, timing/power budgets, verification approach, and support notes suitable for long-term product maintenance.
Mentor and support engineers, especially graduates/apprentices: create well-scoped work packages, provide guidance and review, and help maintain delivery momentum despite high junior-engineer rotation.
Essential requirements
Strong, demonstrable experience in modern C for embedded systems.
Proven experience designing and maintaining embedded firmware architectures for MCU-based products.
In-depth understanding of ARM microcontroller architectures (e.g., Cortex‑M), including interrupts/exceptions/DMA, memory systems, timers, and common peripherals.
Solid experience with bare-metal real-time firmware development and debugging on real hardware.
Practical experience building reliable firmware around serial/low-level communications protocols (e.g., SPI, I²C, UART, CAN/RS‑485, or similar) and diagnosing hardware/firmware integration issues.
Experi
Benefits
Vision insurance
Additional Information
Job Description
Lead Embedded Software Engineer
Wotton under Edge / Hybrid (3 days office based)
up to £60,000 depending on experience
Renishaw's Encoder Products Division (EPD) designs and supplies cutting-edge position feedback technology to the world's precision measurement, automation, and manufacturing industries. It is highly likely that something you own contains a part or device that was manufactured with the help of one of Renishaw's encoder products.
EPD is made up of engineers, scientists and technicians all working together to produce market leading products for sale around the world. We start with cutting edge optical, algorithm and circuit design, developing our own ASICs and sensors where required; we then use innovative mechanical engineering to turn our core technology into a range of desirable products for our broad customer base.
Working closely with colleagues in our manufacturing division, we develop manufacturing and assembly processes and software to deliver quality products by the hundreds of thousands that in turn, perform reliably and repeatedly to sub-micron accuracies for our customers.
We're looking for a Lead Embedded Software Engineer to take technical ownership of the firmware in our high-performance sensor and encoder products. This is a hands-on role combining architecture and delivery leadership with day-to-day embedded development, debugging, and verification on real hardware.
Our systems are typically bare-metal and real-time, and in some products the MCU works alongside an FPGA (either as a co-processor to the FPGA or with the FPGA as a co-processor to the MCU). For certain product lines, you will also contribute to development practices and evidence that support functional safety certification.
You'll work closely with systems, electronics, algorithms, FPGA/RTL, and test team - and you'll play a key role in mentoring graduates and apprentices, helping the team deliver reliably while developing capability.
Renishaw · Wotton-under-edge, UK