Engineering-led recruitment
Engineering recruitment for embedded, firmware, FPGA and electronics teams building real products.
Australia · New Zealand · USA
Selected examples from RunTime’s recruitment history.
The market has changed
A single role can generate dozens of seemingly qualified candidates. AI can polish CVs and cover letters in seconds.
The difficult part isn’t finding people anymore.
It’s working out who genuinely has the engineering depth to do the job.
Our approach
We take the time to understand your system, the real requirements and the engineering problems behind the role.
We assess engineers properly, challenge vague briefs and present people who are genuinely worth your time, not just more CVs.
How We WorkTechnical assessment
Profiles are considered against the actual system, role and engineering problems. Capability signals support a human-led assessment; they do not form a fixed automated rejection rule.
Assessment complete
Hiring several engineers at once?
For a hiring push of four or more engineering roles, Lance can join your team as an Embedded Talent Partner, working inside your ATS and under your company email. Two partners per quarter.
Founder-led
Before recruitment, Lance developed electronics and firmware for industrial equipment, gaming systems and telecommunications products. His work spanned C and assembly, RTOS-based firmware, RS485 networks, Ethernet interfaces, bridging and TCP/IP routing. At Mentor Graphics, he managed embedded development tools in Australia, providing developer training and technical support.
He continued building across Unix/Linux systems, server hardware, virtualization, systems programming and application development. Today, his work includes self-hosted AI and agentic systems, alongside hands-on RISC-V and Transputer projects.
That experience informs how he assesses engineers: what they personally owned, how they investigated failures and what it took to get the system working.
More about Lance →
“The difference between a good hire and a bad hire often comes down to whether you understand the engineering well enough to ask the right questions.”
Current personal projects
Recent hands-on work in embedded operating systems, board bring-up and legacy hardware integration.
Compared three operating systems on the same Allwinner D1 hardware, investigating board bring-up, watchdog resets, timer behaviour and benchmark validity. The work also produced a native touchscreen application with working display, touch input and Wi-Fi.
The tested configurations use different protection and execution models; the comparison is not a claim that one OS is universally superior.Explore the project on GitHub ↗
Interfacing an INMOS B004 Transputer board with Linux through a USB-to-ISA bridge. The ongoing work includes C diagnostic tools, a Linux port of the INMOS host server, and investigation of bootstrap loading, memory mapping and communication protocols.
An ongoing hardware bring-up and integration project; Linux remains the host environment and does not run on the Transputer.Explore the project on GitHub ↗Agentic embedded development
Coding agents can generate firmware, tests and drivers. But understanding hardware behaviour, timing, concurrency and why a system fails still takes engineering judgment.
Engineering review complete
From Lance’s engineering notebook
Technical observations and hiring judgment, discussed with engineers on LinkedIn.
Agent-assisted debugging
Logs, traces and coding agents accelerate fault isolation. But identifying the cause of an interrupt timing failure, DMA corruption or hardware race condition still requires understanding the whole system.
Engineer reviews measured result
Engineering market pulse
Hiring activity, skills in demand, salary movement and location trends across Australia and the USA.
Updated twice monthly.
View Market PulseWhat people say
★★★★★“Had a great experience with Runtime. A big thank you to Aldwin, who was incredibly helpful, professional, and supportive throughout the whole process. Highly recommend!”
★★★★★“Lance proactively secured my opportunity and made the hiring process smooth with his professionalism, clear communication, and genuine support throughout.”
★★★★★“I had a great experience working with both Simon and Lance at Runtime. They were responsive, diligent, and took the time to truly understand my background and career goals.”
Frequently asked questions
We specialise in embedded systems, firmware, FPGA and digital design, electronics and hardware, controls, robotics, edge AI, and technical leadership roles.
RunTime was founded by an embedded engineer. We understand the systems behind each brief, assess technical depth and present a focused shortlist rather than matching keywords.
We support both, choosing the model that fits the complexity, urgency and seniority of the role. For teams with several critical hires ahead, Lance can also join your team as an Embedded Talent Partner.
Yes. We recruit across Australia, New Zealand and the USA.
Yes. We can diagnose why a search is not producing the right candidates, refine the brief and directly approach relevant engineers.
Placement terms include a replacement guarantee. The exact coverage is agreed before a search begins and set out in the terms of business.
Let’s talk
If you’re building a product and the engineer matters to the outcome, talk to us.
Discuss a Critical HireHiring several engineers at once? See Embedded Talent Partner →
