Firmware Engineer - AirPods
Apple
Other Engineering
San Diego, CA, USA
USD 139,500-258,100 / year + Equity
Posted on Dec 13, 2025
The AirPods Firmware team is looking for an enthusiastic engineer to join our team. This is an individual contributor role to develop the technical development of the audio platform for our products. You will have the opportunity to drive the technology and product development for Apple's consumer audio products. In this role, you will work with a wide cross-functional team to continually innovate technology implemented in Apple products.
This is a high visibility role that involves architecting and developing our audio platform. This platform is a key technology that integrates and manages the data and system states for our products. We are seeking someone who is passionate about our products and the drive to improving the quality and innovation of our deliverables. The people here at Apple don’t just build products — they build the kind of wonder that’s revolutionized entire industries. Excellent communication and collaboration is a must, as you will be asked to partner with team members and other engineering teams.
- Collaborate with cross-functional engineering and design teams to define product features and requirements
- Design, implement, debug, and test embedded C/C++ code running on MCU’s for Apple-branded audio products
- Develop highly efficient firmware designs delivering outstanding performance, optimizing power and memory footprints while meeting latency requirements
- Enable expansion of our product ecosystem features through creation of performance and test tools
- Debug real-time systems with limited visibility, working hands-on with development hardware and lab equipment
- Align cross-functional teams behind complex problems and solutions
- BS or MS in Science or Engineering
- 5+ years of proven excellence in firmware, embedded software, embedded product development, or equivalent experience
- Solid C/C++ coding abilities, experience implementing firmware in RTOS environments
- Embedded software fundamentals, including knowledge of design and development-flows, real-time constraints, concurrency, multi-threaded environments
- Software and hardware debugging skills, familiarity with low-level hardware interfaces (I2C, SPI, UART, etc)
- Passion for product ownership, defining the customer experience, and track record of product development
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Experience with Python and/or other scripting languages
- Experience with configuration and release management (git), continuous integration, unit and regression testing
- Experience working with globally distributed teams working on large scale software projects
- Strong understanding of design strategies for maintainability, scalability, and code reuse
- Experience with development board and/or new silicon bringup
- Experience with SoC power management, flash storage management, filesystems, telemetry and/or logging firmware
Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant.