Staff, Systems Design – System Architect

Work Schedule

Environmental Conditions

Job Description

As part of the Thermo Fisher Scientific team, you’ll discover meaningful work that makes a positive impact on a global scale. Join our colleagues in bringing our Mission to life every single day to enable our customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer. We provide our global teams with the resources needed to achieve individual career goals while helping to take science a step beyond by developing solutions for some of the world’s toughest challenges, like protecting the environment, making sure our food is safe or helping find cures for cancer.

Description

Join our team as a Staff, Systems Design – System Architect at Thermo Fisher Scientific. In this role, you will provide technical architecture and leadership for firmware and low-level embedded software supporting advanced scientific instruments and laboratory automation platforms.

You will define the firmware architecture that enables reliable control of motors, sensors, fluidics, optics, imaging, thermal systems, and other electro-mechanical subsystems. You will work closely with electrical, mechanical, systems, embedded software, quality, and product teams to translate product needs into robust, testable, and maintainable firmware solutions.

As a staff-level technical leader, you will establish architectural direction, guide implementation decisions, resolve complex hardware/software integration issues, and mentor engineers. Your work will directly support the performance, reliability, safety, and manufacturability of instruments that enable scientific discovery.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead firmware architecture and technical design for instrument controllers, embedded electronics, and electro-mechanical subsystems.
• Define hardware abstraction, firmware component boundaries, interfaces, real-time behavior, and communications between controllers and higher-level embedded software.
• Translate system and product requirements into firmware requirements, architecture specifications, interface-control documents, and implementation plans.
• Architect firmware for motion control, sensor acquisition, actuator control, fluidics, thermal control, optical systems, diagnostics, safety monitoring, and error recovery.
• Establish reusable firmware platforms, coding standards, design patterns, and technical-review practices across products.
• Partner with electrical, mechanical, systems, and embedded software teams through board bring-up, integration, verification, release, and sustaining support.
• Lead root-cause analysis for complex firmware, electronics, timing, communication, reliability, and field issues.
• Define firmware verification strategies, including unit testing, integration testing, hardware-in-the-loop testing, fault injection, and system-level verification.
• Guide board bring-up, firmware debugging, performance optimization, and hardware/software interface validation.
• Mentor firmware engineers and provide technical leadership across multiple development teams.
• Influence firmware platform roadmaps, component reuse strategy, development tooling, and engineering-process improvements.

Minimum Requirements

• Advanced degree plus 6 years of experience, or bachelor’s degree plus 8 years of experience in firmware development, embedded systems, or complex electro-mechanical product development.
• Degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
• Demonstrated experience architecting and delivering firmware for complex products with embedded controllers, sensors, actuators, and electronics.
• Strong proficiency in C and/or C++ for firmware and embedded systems development.
• Experience developing for microcontrollers, embedded processors, RTOS-based platforms, bare-metal environments, or comparable embedded computing platforms.
• Strong knowledge of real-time software design, interrupt handling, timing analysis, memory constraints, concurrency, and fault handling.
• Experience with device drivers, board-support packages, hardware abstraction layers, bootloaders, or low-level platform software.
• Experience with hardware interfaces and communication protocols such as SPI, I²C, UART, CAN, Ethernet, USB, RS-485, or similar.
• Experience debugging hardware-connected software using tools such as JTAG/SWD debuggers, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, protocol analyzers, or equivalent tools.
• Experience with version control, code review, continuous integration, automated testing, and release management.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, communication, and technical leadership skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with motion control, motor control, fluidics, thermal control, optics, imaging, sensors, precision measurement, or laboratory automation.
• Experience with safety-critical, regulated, high-reliability, medical-device, scientific instrument, or industrial-control products.
• Experience with ARM-based platforms, FreeRTOS, embedded Linux, Zephyr, QNX, or comparable embedded operating systems.
• Experience with functional safety, risk management, cybersecurity, secure boot, firmware update mechanisms, or threat modeling.
• Experience developing manufacturing test software, diagnostic capabilities, calibration routines, or service tools.
• Experience using Python or similar languages for firmware test automation, hardware bring-up, diagnostics, or data analysis.
• Experience with Agile product development methodologies.
• Ability to travel up to 20% as needed.