Years and years of search involving hardware and embedded systems design does something a generalist firm can't shortcut. It teaches you what the work actually is in each kind of company that does it — and those companies are not alike.

The range of it

Consumer electronics and wearables — products people hold, wear, and listen to, where the hardware and the embedded software together are the experience. A consumer wearable is hardware and embedded hiring in its purest form: sensors, board, firmware, and power budget, all riding on a wrist.
Medical products — small companies and large ones, where an embedded engineer's work sits inside a regulated product and the standard is not just that it works, but that it can be proven to work.
Telecommunications — routers and transport systems, the equipment that moves the world's traffic, built by companies whose names everyone in networking knows.
Communications chips — the companies that make the silicon the rest of the industry builds on.

And it is current, not historical. Right now it includes hardware development and board design for a Cambridge company building first-of-its-kind autonomy software.

What connects that range is the nature of the hiring. In every one of those sectors, the embedded engineer is a product developer, not an IT hire: the code ships inside the thing the company sells, it lives under hardware constraints no software-only engineer ever meets, and a mis-hire is discovered late, expensively, and sometimes in the field. Finding those engineers — and telling the ones who have shipped product from the ones who have talked about it — is the specialty.

When software became half the product

The deepest single record sits in consumer electronics. For decades this company made hardware — some of the most respected audio hardware in the world. Then a second-generation platform arrived: devices, a mobile application, and cloud services, built from the ground up. Software became half the product, and the software organization was nearly two hundred people.

In 2022, the mandate for the new vice president of global software delivery was to pull all of the company's product software — embedded, mobile, cloud platforms, shared services — under one leader, and finish making software a value creator in its own right rather than hardware's supporting act. We placed that vice president. He inherited teams at different levels of maturity that had not yet come together; the first job was to pull them together.

The embedded hiring sat inside that arc, function by function:

Embedded consumer software — one of three retained director searches signed on a single day in July 2024, alongside platform and software quality.
Automotive software — as the car became a software product in its own right, we staffed a software architecture manager for the automotive group and program leadership for automotive software.
Quality leadership — a senior director search in 2023 and a director search the following year, as the quality organization built out a leadership layer of its own.

The relationship is fifteen years old now, and the client credits those leadership groups with the transformation that followed: stronger profitability, entry into markets the company had not competed in, and products delivered at a noticeably higher quality.

And at the other end of the scale

The consumer-wearables end of that range is as pure as hardware hiring gets. At a Boston company building a wearable product athletes train with, we placed the original hardware engineer — one of five people we placed there, alongside the original senior software engineer, product management, and data science. He worked with the founding CTO and CEO to create the first product. The company was a Series A-funded startup when that hire was made; it has since been valued at $10.1 billion — at its March 2026 funding round — and is still private. A wearable lives or dies on its hardware: the sensors, the board, the power budget are the product, and the first hardware engineer sets what every later version has to live up to. That placement was made before the company had any scale at all — which is the point. We have hired hardware engineers for a two-hundred-person software organization being rebuilt, and for a founding team building version one. The calibration question is the same; the answer is never the same hire.

The roles

Embedded Software Engineers and Firmware Engineers (C/C++, Rust, FreeRTOS, Zephyr)
Embedded Software Leadership — Directors and Managers
ASIC / FPGA Designers
Chip Verification Leads (UVM, SystemVerilog)
Signal Processing and RF Engineers
PCB Designers and Board Design Engineers
Automotive Software Architecture and Program Leadership

How an embedded search runs here

The brief that governed the transformation engagement was unusually honest about what the job was not: “You're not going to come in here and build up this whole new thing. We've got a lot of people. They need to be managed.” The platform did not need inventing; it needed to be taken from where it was to where it had to go. The client's distinction has governed our searches in this space ever since: creators and evolvers are different people — and in embedded work, where a platform carries years of shipped product with it, hiring the wrong kind is the expensive mistake.

Every search still starts with the same calibration question — if this placement is a success a year from now, what will we be pointing to that really worked? — and runs on the same Playbook process, with acceptance verified before any offer is put in writing.

Start with the question

Every hardware and embedded search we run starts with one question: a year from now, what worked? Tell us where you're headed and we'll tell you honestly whether we're the right firm to get you there. If we're not, we'll tell you who is.

Current openings, in this practice and otherwise, live on the jobs page — that is the one place they stay current.