senior engineer

Company:

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General Summary:

As part of Qualcomm's AI Software organisation, this role focuses on developing embedded software and hardware drivers for next-generation low-power accelerator and multi-DSP platforms on Qualcomm Snapdragon products. The engineer will design and optimise low-level software across operating-system services, memory subsystems, device drivers and inter-processor communication, enabling reliable, power-efficient operation across mobile and edge platforms.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, integrate and test embedded software, firmware and runtime components for low-power accelerator and DSP subsystems.

• Develop and maintain hardware drivers for machine-learning accelerators, including device initialisation, resource management, interrupt handling, power-state transitions and error recovery.

• Design software for multi-DSP and heterogeneous compute architectures, including workload partitioning, synchronisation and coordination across processors.

• Implement and optimise inter-processor communication mechanisms such as shared-memory transport, message queues, signalling, interrupts and remote procedure calls.

• Develop robust memory-management solutions covering static and dynamic allocation, memory pools, shared memory, virtual-to-physical address translation, cache coherency and DMA handling.

• Analyse and optimise embedded software for latency, throughput, memory footprint and power consumption on target platforms.

• Debug complex system-level issues involving operating systems, drivers, firmware, concurrency, memory corruption and processor interactions using target debugging and profiling tools.

• Build unit, integration and system-level test frameworks for embedded software and hardware-driver validation.

• Collaborate with hardware, systems, firmware and platform software teams on architecture, bring-up, integration, validation and commercialisation.

Required Skills and Experience

• Strong embedded C programming skills, with hands-on experience in low-level software development; working knowledge of C++ is desirable.

• Strong understanding of operating-system concepts, including processes and threads, scheduling, synchronisation, interrupts, timers, virtual memory and device-driver models.

• Hands-on experience with RTOS and/or embedded Linux environments, including board bring-up, kernel-facing interfaces and system debugging.

• Deep understanding of memory handling in embedded systems, including stack and heap usage, memory pools, alignment, fragmentation, memory protection, cache behaviour and coherency.

• Experience with multi-core, multi-DSP or heterogeneous processor architectures and associated concurrency challenges.

• Experience implementing inter-processor communication using shared memory, mailboxes, message queues, interrupts, RPC or equivalent mechanisms.

• Experience developing hardware drivers, preferably for accelerator, DSP, NPU or other high-performance compute blocks.

• Good understanding of computer architecture, including CPU/DSP pipelines, caches, MMU/IOMMU, DMA, bus interfaces and memory-mapped I/O.

• Experience with multi-threaded programming, POSIX/Pthreads, synchronisation primitives and race-condition analysis.

• Proficiency with embedded debugging and profiling tools such as JTAG, trace tools, crash dumps, logic analysers and performance profilers.

• Strong fundamentals in data structures, algorithms, software design and fixed-point programming.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively with cross-functional, geographically distributed teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong system-level understanding of SoC architecture, including CPU, DSP, NPU/AI accelerators, memory hierarchy, cache coherency, DMA engines, buses, and interconnects, with the ability to analyze hardware-software interactions effectively.

• Proven experience interpreting hardware architecture specifications, programming guides, register descriptions, and functional specifications to design, develop, and optimize low-level software and hardware drivers.

• Hands-on experience developing and debugging hardware drivers based on hardware documentation, including device initialization, interrupt handling, power management, resource management, error recovery, and performance optimization.

• Strong understanding of system bring-up, boot flows, clock and reset frameworks, power domains, memory subsystems, and platform resource management.

• Familiarity with secure execution environments, memory protection mechanisms, fault-tolerant embedded software design, and system reliability considerations.

• Experience with performance analysis and optimization using hardware performance counters, processor-specific instruction sets, compiler optimizations, and low-level profiling techniques.

Educational Qualifications

Bachelor's, Master's or PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, Electronics and Communication, Computer Science or a related field.

Minimum Qualifications:

OR

Master's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 1+ year of Systems Engineering or related work experience.

OR

PhD in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field.

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