Embedded Software Engineer

About the role

Technology Advancement Group (TAG) is a veteran-owned systems integrator in Ashburn, Virginia. We design, build and integrate assured positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) hardware and software for the Department of Defense and the companies that build for it. Our products include anti-jam CRPA antennas, horizon-nulling antennas and a miniature M-code GPS receiver. All of them are shipping today, with test data behind them, and our engineers integrate them into the systems our customers already run.

We're hiring an Embedded Software Engineer to architect and build the software inside our next generation of PNT products. You'll report to our Technical Director and play a lead architecture and development role: evaluating and selecting processors and subsystems, writing embedded code for single-core and multi-core processors, and integrating civilian and military next-generation GNSS receivers, inertial measurement units (IMUs) and other state-of-the-art sensors. There's no large software organization behind you here, so you'll own decisions from processor selection to the code that ships, working side by side with our hardware, systems and test engineers. The role is based in Ashburn. We'd prefer you on-site, and a hybrid schedule is possible.

On the Android and Linux side, you'll customize and integrate Android OS for embedded devices and custom hardware. You'll work in the Linux kernel, device drivers, the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and system services to get the performance, functionality and hardware compatibility our platforms need. You'll lead board bring-up and board support package (BSP) development, develop and optimize drivers for our peripherals, and debug low-level problems from bootloaders to kernel panics and driver failures. You'll analyze and tune performance and power consumption, and keep the platform secure with secure boot, SELinux and dm-verity.

On the microcontroller side, you'll write code and state machines for 32-bit microcontrollers on bare metal, an RTOS or Android. You'll work across SPI, I2C, UART, MIPI, CAN and USB interfaces, GPIOs and interrupts, and integrate wireless links including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, LoRa and ISM-band radios. You'll manage power through power islands and power states, core switching and dynamic clocking.

Who You Are You're an embedded engineer who wants to own the software from the first register read to the fielded product, and you'd rather build the architecture than inherit it.

You live close to the hardware. You're at home with a datasheet, a scope and a debug probe. When a new board comes up dead, you want to be the one who finds out why.

You think in systems. Processor choice, power budget, boot time and security all trade against each other. You weigh them together, and you can explain why you picked what you picked.

You're curious about navigation. You want to know how a GNSS receiver tracks a signal, how an IMU carries the solution when GPS is jammed, and what that means for the code that brings them together. When something is new to you, you read up and keep asking questions until it makes sense.