Lead Firmware Engineer; Embedded C

Help grow a safer, cleaner, healthier future for everyone, every day.

At Alicat, engineers design hardware and firmware that are built, tested, and manufactured under the same roof, giving you direct ownership and immediate impact on real products.

We specialize in high‑performance instrumentation for measuring and controlling flow and pressure. Our products support aerospace, bioprocessing, energy, environmental science, and advanced research, where precision, stability, and reliability are essential.

Our engineering environment is tightly integrated and highly collaborative. We avoid bureaucracy, make decisions quickly, and value engineers who take ownership and enjoy solving real technical problems.

All our instruments are built in‑house at our Tucson, Arizona facility. This vertical integration gives engineers full visibility from concept through production, enabling rapid iteration and strong cross‑functional collaboration.

Alicat’s mission is to accelerate the evolution of science and technology by giving researchers and innovators the tools to explore, build, and solve complex challenges. We are part of Halma plc, a global FTSE 100 group focused on growing a safer, cleaner, healthier future. Through Halma, we benefit from long‑term stability and investment while maintaining the agility and culture of a mid‑size engineering team.

If you want to work at the intersection of physics, electronics, and embedded systems and help build instrumentation that enables the next generation of technological breakthroughs, Alicat is an exceptional place to do it. #Alicat

As a Lead Firmware Engineer at Alicat Scientific, you will architect, implement, and own the embedded firmware that powers our high‑precision flow and pressure instrumentation systems. You will develop robust, deterministic firmware that directly controls sensors, valves, communication interfaces, and calibration systems operating in demanding real‑world environments.

You will work at the boundary between electronics and physics, implementing real‑time control algorithms, signal processing routines, and communication protocols that must perform with stability and accuracy across wide dynamic ranges. Your firmware will interact closely with precision analog circuitry, digital control systems, and production calibration processes.

Collaboration is central to this role. You will work closely with Electrical, Mechanical, Software, and Test Engineering to ensure seamless system integration from early hardware bring‑up through validation, production release, and long‑term sustainment.

In addition to your technical contributions, you will provide leadership for a small firmware team. This is a deeply hands‑on role. You will actively write production code while guiding architecture decisions, reviewing contributions, mentoring engineers, and establishing clear, lightweight processes and standards that define how firmware is developed at Alicat.

You will help formalize and continuously improve firmware development workflows, documentation standards, code review expectations, version control practices, and validation procedures appropriate for a fast‑iteration, vertically integrated engineering environment.

Based full‑time at our Tucson, Arizona facility, you will have full visibility into the product lifecycle and own meaningful firmware outcomes from initial architecture through manufacturing release and field support of new products.

• Architect and implement embedded firmware in C for advanced flow and pressure control instruments.
• Design and maintain modular, scalable firmware architectures supporting long product life cycles.
• Develop real‑time control systems including PID loops, filtering algorithms, and calibration routines.
• Implement hardware abstraction layers and drivers for ADCs, DACs, timers, PWM, DMA, EEPROM/Flash, and sensor interfaces.
• Integrate communication interfaces including UART, SPI, I²C, USB, RS232/RS485, CAN, and industrial protocols such as Modbus, Ether Net/IP, IO-Link, and related standards.
• Develop and maintain bootloaders, firmware update strategies, and diagnostic systems.
• Debug firmware at…