Lead Embedded Software Engineer
Location: Ealing Area – With Hybrid Working from Home
Salary: Up to £80,000 + Extensive Benefits
The Role
KO2’s client is looking for a Lead Embedded Software Engineer to drive the development of robust, scalable embedded software solutions for next-generation electric products. This role combines hands-on technical delivery with small-team leadership, offering the opportunity to influence architecture, mentor engineers, and shape the future direction of embedded platforms.
You will play a key role across the full product lifecycle — from early-stage prototyping and system design through to production, manufacturing, and long-term product support — while helping build engineering best practices and delivery capability within the team.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the design and development of high-quality embedded software that is efficient, maintainable, scalable, and production-ready
- Provide technical leadership to a small embedded software team, supporting task planning, technical direction, mentoring, and code reviews
- Collaborate closely with hardware, systems, and manufacturing teams to support board bring-up, debugging, integration, and system validation
- Own key architectural decisions, helping define software frameworks, coding standards, development processes, and long-term platform strategy
- Design, implement, test, and maintain embedded software for internally developed electric systems and connected devices
- Investigate and resolve complex real-time issues relating to timing, performance, reliability, and signal integrity
- Support continuous improvement initiatives across tooling, automation, testing, and development workflows
- Contribute to project planning, technical estimation, risk management, and delivery milestones
- Champion engineering best practices including documentation, version control, CI/CD, and software quality standards
About You
- Strong commercial experience developing embedded software in C and C++
- Proven experience leading or mentoring engineers within a small technical team or project environment
- Strong understanding of embedded systems architecture and full software development lifecycle practices
- Experience developing RTOS-based applications
- Hands-on experience with embedded communication protocols such as BLE, CAN, I2C, UART, or SPI
- Comfortable working across hardware/software boundaries, including debugging and system integration
- Experience using version control systems, particularly Git, within collaborative development environments
- A proactive technical problem-solver with strong analytical and root-cause investigation skills
- Ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Desirable Skills
- Exposure to functional safety standards such as ISO 13849 or ISO 26262
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern development tooling (e.g. Jenkins, Docker)
- Familiarity with Python for automation, tooling, or test development
- Experience contributing to technical roadmaps, architectural strategy, or platform standardisation
Why Apply?
This is an excellent opportunity for a senior embedded engineer ready to step into a lead role — or an existing lead engineer looking for greater technical ownership and influence within an innovative engineering environment developing advanced electric products.
Apply today with an up-to-date CV