Chase every microamp. Design protocols and hardware management for battery-powered sensors and gateways where the gap between good firmware and great firmware is measured in years of device life.
+ years building firmware for resource-constrained systems , on products that shipped to real customers and then had to survive in the field.
Fluency in C. You know what the compiler is doing, and you can read a linker map, a stack trace, or a corrupted heap without guessing.
Solid bare-metal and RTOS experience - Zephyr, FreeRTOS, or equivalent. You have made scheduling, memory and timing decisions. Mutexes and semaphores are everyday tools for you.
You have helped bring up new boards. First power-on of unproven hardware, at the bench with the electrical engineer who drew it up, working out whether the bug is in your code, a library, the schematic, or the part itself.
Fluency in the low-level interfaces - SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, ADC and the ability to debug the seam between hardware and software.
