Embedded software development teams for firmware that ships and survives the field.
Hire dedicated senior embedded engineers from a staffing partner founded by a four-time founder. We place firmware, driver, and embedded Linux engineers in the Philippines who own the on-device half of the system, from the bootloader to the RTOS to the radio. If you need the full device-to-cloud build, see our IoT software development practice. Pre-vetted, full-time, and ready in as little as 7 days.
- Inc. 5000 honoreefive years running
- 350+ senior engineerson staff, across every stack
- 200+ companies servedsince 2018
- 700+ engineer placementsinto US software teams
Not a dev shop building it for you. Your embedded team, building with you.
Most embedded software development companies quote you a fixed-bid firmware project, build it behind a vendor wall, and hand back a binary you can't maintain. We staff dedicated senior engineers into your team. You own them, manage them, and keep them, along with the device knowledge.
The turnkey vendor model
The big custom-software shops
- Fixed-bid firmware project, scoped up front, priced in the hundreds of thousands
- Engineers walled off behind an account manager
- 30–40% overhead for layers you never meet
- Hand-off at the end, and the firmware knowledge walks out the door
The Full Scale staff-augmentation model
Dedicated engineers, embedded in your team
- $35/hr fully loaded, scale up or down as the roadmap changes
- Engineers in your standups, Slack, repo, and roadmap
- No vendor wall and no PM tax, you manage them directly
- 93%+ retention means the engineers, and the device knowledge, stay
Co-founded VinSolutions, the #1 CRM in the auto industry ($150M+ exit), and founded Stackify
Built by a founder who has shipped and sold real software
Full Scale was founded by Matt Watson, a four-time founder and CTO with 20+ years in software engineering. He co-founded VinSolutions, the #1 CRM platform in the auto industry, acquired for around $150 million, and founded Stackify, a developer-tools company he later sold. He also wrote Product Driven, the engineering-leadership method every Full Scale engineer is trained on.
Full Scale exists because Matt kept hitting the same wall as an operator: good products stall when you can't hire and keep good engineers. That is the problem we solve, and it is why we vet for the senior, product-minded engineers most staffing shops never find.
Engineers experienced across the embedded stack
We don't sell you a pre-built product. We staff engineers who have shipped firmware to real hardware before and know where drivers, timing, and power budgets break. This is the on-device engineering. For the device cloud, dashboards, and telemetry pipelines, see our [IoT software development](https://fullscale.io/iot-software-development/) practice.
Firmware & RTOS
Bare-metal and RTOS firmware in C and C++ on FreeRTOS or Zephyr, bootloaders, interrupt handling, and scheduling built for hard real-time constraints.
Device drivers & board support
Sensor and peripheral drivers, board support packages, and the bring-up work that gets a new board from first power-on to a stable platform.
Connectivity
BLE, MQTT, LoRaWAN, and cellular integration on the device, plus the protocol stacks and retry logic that keep flaky links from dropping data.
Embedded Linux
Yocto and Buildroot images, kernel and device-tree configuration, and userspace services for gateways and higher-end devices that run Linux.
Edge & low-power computing
On-device processing, local inference, sleep-mode and duty-cycle design, and the power budgeting that decides whether a battery device lasts days or years.
Hardware-software integration & testing
Bring-up alongside your hardware team, hardware-in-the-loop test rigs, and the integration work where the firmware meets the silicon and the field.
Engineers who treat firmware security and updatability as architecture
A shipped device is hard to patch and easy to attack. Our engineers design for secure boot, signed updates, and over-the-air recovery from the first commit, not after a field recall forces it.
The embedded specialists on our bench
Firmware engineers
C, C++, RTOS, bare-metal
Driver engineers
BSP, peripherals, bring-up
Embedded Linux engineers
Yocto, Buildroot, kernel
Connectivity engineers
BLE, LoRaWAN, cellular
Rust engineers
Memory-safe firmware
Edge / low-power
On-device inference, power budgets
QA automation
Hardware-in-the-loop testing
Solutions architects
Device-level design
The embedded stack our engineers work in
Languages
RTOS & OS
Connectivity
Build & toolchains
Hardware
Test & integration
Why most offshore embedded teams fail
The mistake isn't going offshore. It's hiring the cheapest developer you can find and hoping the firmware holds up once the device is in someone's hands. I call that cheapshoring, and embedded punishes it harder than almost anything else. A web bug is a deploy away from fixed. A firmware bug is sitting in a field that's hard to reach and harder to patch, and the shortcut someone took to hit a rate becomes your recall.
Embedded rewards engineers who respect the constraints, the timing, the power budget, the memory you don't have. That's a hiring bar, not a price point, which is the whole reason we accept under 3% of applicants and train every engineer on the Product Driven method to think like owners of the device, not contractors billing hours against it.
From call to coding in as little as 7 days
- 1Tell us the embedded roles and stack you need
- 2We match pre-vetted engineers from our bench
- 3You interview and pick your team
- 4They start in your standups, repo, and roadmap
Embedded Software Development Services, answered
- Do you staff firmware and RTOS engineers, not just application developers?
- Yes. We place engineers who work at the device level, from bare-metal and RTOS firmware in C and C++ to drivers, board support, and embedded Linux.
- What's the difference between this and your IoT practice?
- Embedded is the on-device engineering, the firmware, drivers, and low-power work that lives on the hardware. The full device-to-cloud system, including the cloud backend and dashboards, is our IoT software development practice.
- Is this a fixed-bid project or a dedicated team?
- A dedicated team. We are a staff augmentation partner, so you get engineers embedded in your team at $35/hr, not a turnkey firmware quote.
- How fast can an embedded team start?
- As little as 7 days from the first call to engineers in your standups, drawing from a pre-vetted bench.
- Who owns the code and the IP?
- You do, from day one. Our engineers work in your repositories under your process.
Staffing engineering teams across every industry
Embedded engineering guides
IoT software development
The full device-to-cloud system, where embedded meets the cloud.
Automotive software development
Embedded engineering for vehicles and ECUs.
Manufacturing software development
Firmware and IIoT for the shop floor.
Cheapshoring: the embedded version
Why the cheapest firmware developer is the most expensive.