Software Design Engineer

Software Design Engineer 4

Duration :  8 months

Location : Redmond WA

Name: Top 3 Must-Have HARD Skills & years of experience for eachValue: LLVM / Compiler Engineering – 5+ years
C/C++ Systems Programming – 7+ years
Security Fuzzing & Vulnerability Research – 3–5+ years

Description: build and advance a next-generation firmware security analysis platform within Azure Hardware Security. This system combines large language models (LLMs), compiler technology, and automated fuzzing to identify security vulnerabilities in firmware at scale, significantly reducing the effort required for manual security assessments.

The project addresses a critical industry challenge: much of today''s firmware is developed by third parties and has not historically been analyzed with the same rigor as first-party software. By automating key aspects of firmware security review, this platform enables repeatable, scalable analysis that improves overall security posture while supporting a broader ecosystem of hardware and firmware providers.

As a member of the engineering team, you will work directly with security researchers, compiler engineers, and platform developers to build production-quality tooling spanning LLVM, fuzzing infrastructure, static analysis, AI-assisted automation, and open-source engineering practices.

Responsibilities
Build and Enhance Security Analysis Pipelines
Develop preprocessing pipelines that compile C/C++ firmware code into LLVM Intermediate Representation (IR).
Implement and maintain LLVM-based transformations to make firmware suitable for off-target analysis and fuzzing.
Create and improve code-analysis workflows, including call-graph extraction, metadata generation, and static-analysis integrations.
Design and maintain systems that generate and execute fuzzing campaigns using modern fuzzing frameworks and AI-assisted techniques.
Improve crash triage systems that automatically identify, deduplicate, and analyze security findings.
Develop automated mechanisms to classify code semantics and improve analysis accuracy.
Security Automation and Tooling
Build scalable automation that combines compiler infrastructure, security tooling, and AI-driven workflows.
Enhance vulnerability detection pipelines and help reduce false positives through improved analysis techniques.
Improve reporting systems that transform raw security findings into actionable engineering insights.
Validate analysis approaches across multiple firmware targets and environments.
Open-Source Readiness
Improve system reliability, modularity, test coverage, and CI/CD automation.
Create developer documentation, onboarding guides, and architectural references.
Support dependency review, reproducible builds, and general open-source readiness activities.
Help establish contribution workflows, issue triage practices, and release processes for external contributors.
Engineering Excellence
Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code.
Participate in design reviews and technical architecture discussions.
Collaborate closely with engineers across security, hardware, and platform teams.
Contribute to long-term technical strategy and platform evolution.
Required Qualifications
Bachelor''s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Strong professional experience developing software in C/C++.
Hands-on experience with compiler technologies, LLVM, or low-level systems programming.
Experience working with fuzzing frameworks such as libFuzzer, AFL, AFL++, or similar technologies.
Strong understanding of software security principles, including memory-safety vulnerabilities and root-cause analysis.
Proficiency with Python for automation and tooling development.
Experience using Git-based development workflows.
Demonstrated ability to write well-tested, maintainable, and documented production code.

Preferred Qualifications
Experience with firmware, embedded systems, device software, or bare-metal development.
Knowledge of hardware abstraction layers (HALs), MMIO, emulation, rehosting, or cross-compilation techniques.
Experience with static-analysis platforms such as CodeQL.
Familiarity with program-analysis concepts such as call graphs, data-flow analysis, or IR transformations.
Experience integrating AI, machine learning, or LLM technologies into engineering workflows.
Previous open-source contributor or maintainer experience.
Experience building CI/CD pipelines and release automation.
Familiarity with Azure DevOps, GitHub, or similar development platforms.
Ideal Candidate

You are passionate about software security, systems programming, and developer tooling. You enjoy working across multiple layers of the technology stack—from low-level compiler infrastructure to modern AI-assisted development workflows—and thrive in environments where research ideas are transformed into production-quality engineering solutions.

You are equally comfortable debugging compiler-generated code, designing automation pipelines, and collaborating on open-source engineering initiatives. Most importantly, you are motivated by the opportunity to help secure critical firmware ecosystems through innovative analysis technologies.

What Success Looks Like
Security analysis pipelines operate reliably across targeted firmware platforms.
Vulnerability findings are actionable, accurate, and produce significantly fewer false positives than traditional approaches.
New firmware targets can be onboarded efficiently through documented, repeatable processes.
The project achieves a high-quality, sustainable open-source release supported by robust tooling, testing, and documentation.
Engineering improvements directly increase scalability, coverage, and usability for both internal and external contributors.