Embedded Products System Architect (Staff Engineer)
Location: High Wycombe offices with hybrid working available
Term: Full-time, Permanent
Salary: Negotiable plus benefits
Do you have a professional background in embedded software development or embedded system architecture?
Do you enjoy working with people, and have experience helping multidiscipline teams collaborate on systems design?
Are you passionate and knowledgeable about music and audio technology?
If you have answered yes to all the above, we would love to hear from you! As part of our commitment to deliver high quality and reliable products to our customers, we are hiring for a new role to support our growing community of engineers working on connected products with a tech stack from embedded software through to mobile applications.
The full extent of this role is broad and influential, but we are open to applications from people with a range of experience levels for whom this role may be a career progression. If you have some but not all the skills and experience required, we would still love to hear from you - Let us know what you would bring to the role, and why you would be a great fit for the team.
What you’ll be doing:
We are looking for someone to work closely with and support our Engineering teams, with architectural design considerations across our ranges of products. The focus of the role will be on our hardware products, but an awareness of desktop and web technologies would be beneficial.
While of course this is a technical role, we believe that successful system architecture is about people – helping engineers and teams to communicate, collaborate, and successfully work together to build, test, and maintain integrated and scalable designs. The role will help to ensure that the Business and Product Strategy is informing the technical research and discovery, and that we are able to quickly iterate as we test emergent product designs.
With a focus on connected architecture, you will engage frequently and closely with our Embedded Software, Automated Test (Design and Manufacturing), Desktop, Mobile, Web and Product Design Teams, to build a community where Tech Leads and Engineers from all teams are contributing to architectural design choices that support our strategy.
Your strategic insight, and awareness of design integrations and interfaces, will help identify the necessary enablers for the teams – those things the system architecture needs to feature, and that teams need to function effectively.
Using quarterly team planning, engineering catchups, and team product demos, you will keep the teams connected and up to date as the product system design evolves and help ensure that any system architectural issues the teams encounter during the implementation are addressed. At team level, you will participate in their solution definition and implementation, and update the architecture with feedback as the teams design, build and test their work.
Non-functional requirements, especially where they exist between or across multiple teams, are also vital to achieve a secure, well performing, sustainable and scalable architectural design. You will be responsible for taking care of these requirements and implementing solutions, getting input from the team tech leads and ensuring they are accounted for as part of the overall system design and delivery.
As part of this role, you will report to the Head of Embedded Software and work closely with other Engineering Managers and Tech Leads across the department.
Key activities include:
- Leading a community of practice that ensures our product system architectures are well considered; secure, high performance, testable, sustainable, and scalable
- Ensuring our product system architectures are aligned to our product and engineering strategy.
- Being a team enabler – ensuring each team is aware of the bigger architectural picture of which they are a part, and able to contribute effectively to that architectural design
- Embedding yourself in those teams at key points in the development cycle, to help in the hands-on implementation of key architectural components.
An ideal candidate is likely to be:
- Experienced in the development of consumer electronic products in a cost-sensitive environment
- Experienced with embedded systems including collaborating with electronics engineers on system design constraints and with software teams on systems integration.
- Experienced in software platform engineering techniques and design methodologies including hands-on development experience in C/C++
- Familiar with systems implementing a mixture of real-time and non-real-time processing
- An advocate for automated testing from unit testing to hardware in the loop, and familiar with principles of Continuous Integration.
- A people person, with excellent communication skills and with a proven track record of helping people and teams work well together.
- Flexible, and able to effectively prioritise and schedule across multiple projects.
- An advocate for good documentation and the importance of knowledge sharing.
- Committed to personal development and aware of the latest industry trends
- Methodical and rigorous, with a logical approach to problem solving.
- Passionate and knowledgeable about music and audio technology
Benefits include flexible/hybrid working, company pension, life insurance, private healthcare, enhanced Maternity and Paternity pay, employee purchase scheme, group bonus scheme, company music events, offsite company parties and free lunch in the canteen. We arrange company training sessions and encourage personal development.
For more information visit
Top Skills
What We Do
We’ll be honest – Focusrite is a pretty great place to work. Incorporating both the Focusrite and Novation brands, we make music easy to make, from bedroom DJs to the greatest show on earth. Everyone who works here has an enormous passion for music: as it says on our website, sound is everything. We take that very seriously – though we have a lot of fun doing it.
As the number one selling audio interface brand worldwide, Focusrite has an illustrious, prestigious, and, let’s face it, cool history. Alongside Novation, the hardware and software that we develop plays an instrumental (see what we did there?) role in shaping the sound of modern music. From amateur to pro, our goal is to help musicians to make their music the very best it can be.
Music has always been an exciting thing to be involved with, and that’s not about to change. We embrace its evolution, and that means being open to new ideas. Our whole business is structured to let everyone contribute and be heard at all levels, and we make sure it’s a fun place to work. Company hack-days, external visits – we’re all about innovation, fresh thinking and great, great products. (Plus, you get a free lunch in the canteen. No really.)
We work hard. We are professional. We select really, really talented people. And we absolutely love our work. So if you think you can bring something new to the mix, we’ll be looking forward to hearing from you.
