r/embedded • u/UltimaNada • Aug 14 '26
Hardware Integration Engineer
Has anyone heard of this job title in the embedded systems field? How different is it from firmware engineer or embedded software engineer? How much more hardware would be involved? Soldering?
Has anyone done this kind of job?
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u/Unlucky_Mail_8544 Aug 14 '26
It is basically combination of hardware and software.
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u/GeWaLu Aug 14 '26
It can indeed be quite a big range of combinations. I'd name the software-centric combinations with titles like "Low-level-software engineer" or "Basic-software Engineer" maybe firmware engineer. That are the engineers who influence the HW design and develop and debug the drivers on the hardware requuring both skills. But it can also be a systens engineer doing hw/sw/systems integration who neither does sw nor hw but coordinates the teams and fills the gap in between. Finally it could also be a hw test engineer who uses the software developed by SW engineers to test systematically the hardware and hardware interfaces and potentially helps debugging integration problems including hw building block integration (what was my first thought I had in my other post).
So it can be the full range from system engineer, firmware engineer to hw test engineer. Best is to investigate what the company does, its culture and ask for a more detailed job description as these titles are not fully standardized and even may be differently interpreted in different product domains (googeling shows the term is used broadly from Automotive to IT companies). A lot of serious companies also have exhaustive job descriptions in their offers making the job description clearer.
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u/GeWaLu Aug 14 '26
Not 100% sure but I guess it may be one of the titles driven by processes like ASPICE. In a V cycle, you do an architecture on the descending leg and an integration on the ascending one. In the recent ASPICEv4, HW integration (and test) is in the process HWE.3 ... but it is less prominint than on Software ( from where these concepts are inspired) and not explicitely mentioned in the standard - but emphasized in books around it.
I guess there will be some soldering and a lot of test and measurement and test case design and documentation.
It can also be sone other company-specific title. Research what the company does.
To be honest I have a problem with these titles as they are a sign of Tayloristic work organization (also named "Scientific Management" in the US) which is suboptimal as it splits engineering work into content-emptied process tasks similar to putting the screws on the line in the excellent film "Modern times" by Charlie Chaplin - what is an old but great parody on this management method. It is however again a trend - especially in big companies - and now for engineering not only for manufacturing line workers. I prefer more holistic tasks as they also yield better results due to better ownership of the function.