Firmware Quality Engineer
Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
Hardware
Be part of the Input Device QE team, focused on testing firmware and ensuring ultra-high quality for Apple's next generation human interface devices. This includes technologies such as Multi-Touch, Heart-rate sensing, Touch ID, and other input device technologies across a variety of Apple’s product lines!
Testing is focused on microcontroller based firmware interfaced with sensors and various other system components. You will be a motivated individual who independently follows up on bugs, collaborates with developers to resolve low-level issues and can understand and discuss technical problems.
Key Qualifications
- An excellent candidate will:
- Have a real passion for quality, enjoy breaking things through creative testing
- Thrive in uncertain, early prototype stages of a project when not all features are working yet, and enjoy putting energy into identifying/classifying issues as a way to improve quality
- Strive to innovate and try new things, incorporating continuous improvement of testing methods
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Description
Core responsibilities include:
- Understanding microcontroller based embedded systems, including algorithms
- Partnering with a development team to quickly understand an architecture, break it
into functional parts, come up with a plan to test/validate, and identify and target
weaknesses
- Crafting creative ways to exercise embedded subsystems, communication protocols (SPI, I2C, etc) and high-level features of embedded devices
- Devising and building test fixtures, building tools and authoring automated scripts
- Carrying out manual and automated test plans on early prototypes, typically at the “grey box” level
- Helping to craft quality from a very early stage, ushering the product from early
prototype to production
- Documentation of test cases and code used for test execution
- Coming up with ideas for custom tools and methods to exercise firmware features
- Supervising performance, reporting results to management, driving issues to closure
Education & Experience
BS or MS in Computer Science /Computer Engineering /Electrical & Electronics Engineering or related degrees 2+ years’ experience with embedded systems, microcontrollers and sensors.
Additional Requirements
- Helpful/Useful experience:
- - Experience writing and/or testing firmware, building embedded systems
- - Knowledge of Mac systems and MacOS/iOS or UNIX variant
- - Track record of shipping phenomenal consumer products
- - Testing automation using Python or similar
- - Use of hardware debugging tools – USB and Bluetooth CATC, protocol analyzer, logic analyzer, oscilloscope
- - Familiarity with C/C++ or object-oriented programming
- - Test tool development
- - Continuous integration systems
- - Algorithm analysis and validation