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Write the code that lives between hardware and the rest of the world.
Embedded engineers write firmware that runs on microcontrollers — ARM Cortex-M, RISC-V, AVR — without a general-purpose OS. You speak to peripherals at the register level, manage real-time constraints, and ship code that has to work for years without crashing. The role lives wherever software meets physical hardware: medical devices, automotive ECUs, industrial controllers, consumer electronics.
“You start by reviewing the ISR latency numbers from yesterday's production firmware — a customer reported missed sensor samples and you suspect a bus driver is taking too long. You instrument with a GPIO toggle, capture on a logic analyzer, find a 200µs spike from an interrupt that was supposed to be sub-50µs, and refactor it into a queue-and-task pattern. After lunch, you review a teammate's MISRA-C deviation document for a DMA buffer pointer, then port an old C driver to Rust on Cortex-M to evaluate whether the team should switch the next-gen product line.”
Recommended curriculum path
Ship production firmware against ARM Cortex-M.
8 required
16 required
24 required
When you complete this track, you'll have built:
ISO/IEC
The C language specification embedded engineers write to daily.
Arm Holdings
The canonical architecture reference for Cortex-M3/M4 — exception model, NVIC, system control space.
MISRA Consortium
The de facto safety-critical C subset. Referenced by ISO 26262, IEC 62304, EN 50128.
IEC
Medical device software lifecycle (Class A/B/C). The standard for embedded software in medical devices.
ISO
Automotive functional safety (ASIL A-D). Anchors the safety case for embedded automotive software.
Roles you can grow into from here.