Firmware Recruitment · San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley
Specialist recruitment for microcontrollers, bare-metal development, RTOS firmware and hardware-facing debug. Led by an engineer who understands the engineering behind the hire.
RunTime clarifies the engineering requirements, searches for relevant candidates, assesses their technical experience and delivers a focused shortlist for an individual role or defined search.
Discuss a specialist hireLance can work inside your hiring operation, collaborating with engineering managers and using your ATS and company email where agreed. This recruitment delivery model can support wider engineering hiring alongside firmware roles.
Discuss an embedded recruiterHow the Embedded Recruiter service works →Firmware recruitment specialisms
Firmware work is defined by where the engineer operates in the system. Application changes, peripheral-driver ownership and platform architecture are different levels of responsibility.
MCU selection, peripherals, startup code and board-level constraints.
Interrupts, scheduling, concurrency and real-time behaviour.
Peripheral protocols, DMA, memory maps, boot and update paths.
JTAG, traces, oscilloscopes and fault isolation on physical hardware.
For San Francisco Bay Area employers
We clarify the MCU or SoC, RTOS or bare-metal environment, peripheral ownership, resource constraints, product stage and immediate debugging responsibilities.
Candidate discussions examine interrupts, tasks, shared resources, memory, boot, update and recovery, plus evidence of how failures were isolated on hardware.
RunTime searches and directly approaches engineers whose experience aligns with the brief, then presents a focused shortlist with evidence, gaps and practical details.
Founder-led technical recruitment
Before recruitment, Lance Harvie developed electronics and firmware for industrial equipment, gaming systems and telecommunications products. He later built decades of specialist recruitment experience.
That background informs the questions RunTime asks about ownership, engineering decisions and fault investigation. It does not replace the client’s detailed technical interview.
RunTime Recruitment has operated since 2019.
More about Lance →
San Francisco Bay Area engineering context
Relevant local themes: physical electronics, integrated systems, semiconductors, sensing.
UC Berkeley’s physical-electronics research covers high-frequency integrated circuits, wireless channels, semiconductor devices, microfabrication, sensors and optoelectronics. These fields reflect the depth of hardware and systems work found across the Bay Area.
Recruitment briefs still need to identify the actual product, ownership boundaries and evidence required rather than relying on the region’s broad technology reputation.
Sources: UC Berkeley Physical Electronics.
For Firmware engineers
Share your resume and the type of work you want to do. Include your preferred working arrangement, location or relocation constraints, and the parts of the development lifecycle you have personally owned.
Submit your resumeFrequently asked questions
We ask where the engineer worked in the stack, what they designed or inherited, which constraints they managed and how they proved the cause of hardware-facing failures.
Yes. RunTime documents the employer’s actual working arrangement and presents it clearly. Onsite, hybrid and remote preferences are not treated as interchangeable.
Relocation can form part of the search where the employer is open to it. Interest, timing and practical constraints are confirmed with each candidate. No relocation or work-authorisation outcome is assumed.
It is designed for a wider or recurring hiring plan where recruitment continuity matters. It is a delivery model, not a reference to embedded software engineering, and its agreed scope can support firmware and related engineering roles.
Discuss your hiring plan
Tell us what you’re building, who you need and when you need them. Choose Specialist Recruitment for a specific hire or Embedded Recruiter support for a wider hiring plan.
Prefer email? webform@runtimerec.com
