Embedded Software Engineer CV Examples & Writing Guide

This is a mid-to-senior firmware engineer with eight years on industrial and motion-control products. The person is fictional, but the shape of the CV is what firmware hiring managers in the UK expect: one to two pages of dense technical detail, hardware named, and numbers attached to memory, timing and defects.

Embedded teams are small and every hire has to touch hardware. The screen is quick and it is about four things.

• Silicon and toolchain overlap. Have you written code for the family they use, or something close enough that the datasheet is the only new part? Name architectures and part families, not just "microcontrollers".
• Whether you have shipped. Hobby boards and coursework are fine for a first job, but for anything above junior the manager wants a product that went to manufacturing, with a unit count or a customer type.
• Debug ability. Say how you found a bug, not just that you fixed it. Scope, logic analyser, JTAG trace, printf over UART, a bisect through 300 commits: the method is the signal.
• Constraints you have worked under. Flash and RAM budgets, current draw, interrupt latency, real-time deadlines, safety standards. Firmware is engineering under limits, so the limits belong on the page.

“I can teach a new chip in a month. What I cannot teach quickly is someone who thinks in microseconds and bytes. So I read for constraints. If a CV tells me you fit a stack into 24 KB, or held a control loop under 20 microseconds of jitter, you go to the phone screen even if you have never touched our part.”

Three or four lines at the top. Years, the architecture family, the RTOS or bare metal, the domain, and one number. Skip the career objective unless you are a graduate or changing domain.

The pattern that works: what you wrote, on what hardware, under what constraint, with what result. Most firmware CVs stop after the first clause.

Do not write one long comma list. Group by category so a manager can scan for the row that matters to their job advert, and keep every item something you could be asked about in an interview.

• Languages: C (C99, C11), C++ (11/17), Python for tooling, a little assembly for startup code and ISRs, Rust if you actually use it
• Architectures and parts: ARM Cortex-M0+/M4/M7/M33, Cortex-A, RISC-V, TI C2000, AVR, ESP32, and the vendor families you have shipped (STM32, nRF52, i.MX RT, PIC)
• RTOS and OS: FreeRTOS, Zephyr, ThreadX, embedded Linux, bare-metal super-loop, plus scheduling and priority inversion in interview terms
• Buses and protocols: I2C, SPI, UART, CAN and CANopen, LIN, Modbus, USB (device and host), Ethernet, BLE, LoRa, MQTT
• Tools: GCC arm-none-eabi, IAR, Keil, CMake, Make, Git, GitLab or GitHub CI, Segger J-Link and Ozone, OpenOCD, Saleae or similar logic analyser, oscilloscope, bench supply
• Test and quality: Unity, CMock, Ceedling, GoogleTest, hardware-in-the-loop, static analysis, code coverage, MISRA C:2012

Soft skills matter here in a specific way. Firmware sits between hardware, test and product, so put one line in your experience showing you worked across those groups: a design review you ran, a manufacturing test you handed to production, a field failure you explained to a customer.

Firmware is one of the few software fields where a personal project is genuinely persuasive, because the hardware proves the work. A project section is worth space if you are junior, changing domain, or your paid work cannot be described.

1. 1Pick two projects, not six. Depth beats a list of blinking LEDs.
2. 2For each one give the board, the language, the interfaces, and a constraint you hit: "nRF52840, Zephyr, BLE plus SPI flash logging, 12 months on 2xAAA measured, not estimated".
3. 3Say what went wrong and what you did. A line about a bug you chased with a logic analyser says more than a feature list.
4. 4Link the repo and keep the README short with a photo of the board, a wiring diagram and build instructions that work.

Graduate and entry-level versions are a common search on this job title. The good news is that embedded hiring managers do read student work, as long as the CV looks like an engineer wrote it. Order the page: personal statement, projects, skills, placements or work, education.

• Lead with projects, not education, if you built anything on real hardware. Final-year project, robotics team, a personal board, a Formula Student ECU, an amateur radio build.
• Name the toolchain. "Built in STM32CubeIDE, debugged over SWD with a Nucleo board" tells a manager exactly how far you got.
• Include university modules only when they are specific: microprocessor systems, digital design and Verilog, real-time systems, computer architecture, control systems.
• Any placement or internship counts, even test or manufacturing. Writing the Python script that tests boards on the line is real embedded work.
• Say what you can do without hand-holding: read a datasheet, wire up a UART, write an interrupt handler, use version control.

There is no licence for this job in the UK, and no single certification hiring managers require. What carries weight is the degree, the standards you have worked under, and security clearance if the role needs it.

• Degree: a BEng or MEng in electronic engineering, computer systems engineering or computer science is the usual entry. List the university, degree, classification and year. Drop the classification after your second job unless it was a First or 2:1 and you are still early.
• Safety and quality standards belong in your experience, not a certificate list: IEC 61508 for industrial, ISO 26262 with the ASIL level for automotive, IEC 62304 for medical devices, DO-178C with the DAL level for avionics. Name only the ones you have genuinely worked under.
• MISRA C:2012 is a coding standard, not a certification. Say you have worked to it and what you did to get code compliant.
• Security clearance: if you hold active SC or DV clearance (UK national security vetting), put it in the top section. For defence firmware roles it is often the first filter.

• Two pages at most. One page is fine up to about 10 years; use two after that or if you have a long project list in defence or medical. Nobody in this field reads a third page.
• Plain single-column layout, standard section headings, no photo, no date of birth, no graphic skill bars. UK convention. Save as PDF unless the advert asks for Word.
• Put a short skills band near the top with the part families and RTOS. It is the block recruiters keyword-search.
• Mirror the advert's exact words: if it says "firmware engineer" and "Zephyr", write "firmware" and "Zephyr", not "embedded developer" and "RTOS". Applicant tracking systems match strings, not synonyms.
• Use "CV" and UK spelling. If you are applying to a US employer they will call it a resume, but the content is the same and you still leave the photo off.