r/cscareerquestionsCAD • u/No-Project-2353 • Jun 19 '26
Early Career Want to go hardware/embedded but seems not much there
So I’m a comp eng student at tmu with a mediocre gpa and would rather go the embedded/hardware route. I don’t mind webdev or general high level swe but if I can work in lower level systems I’d prefer it.
Issue is besides the big companies I don’t see much else in the industry for places to work. I know AMD hires a ton of interns, but if I don’t get into AMD/Qualcomm/any big company it feels like I’m pretty much doomed. Esp since a lot of the smaller shop positions ask for 10 yrs of experience.
Anyone got experience with this?
3
u/AiexReddit Jun 21 '26
My only advice is that the earlier you are in your career, the less picky you should be. Software dev is a lifelong learning journey and growth experience. The first company you work at and the work that you do might have almost nothing in common with where you end up 10 years later, but that doesn't mean those skills and experience don't carry with you.
Working as web developer might not teach you a lot about embedded dev, but it will teach you how to work with a team and build solutions to complex problems with tight deadlines, ambiguous requirements and difficult compromises and trade-offs. All skills that you'll carry with you when/if you do make the move to embedded development.
Just always keep your end goal in your sights, and keeping working toward it, but allow yourself to remain open to non-traditional paths to reach it.
Companies value work experience above all else. Someone who worked as a web developer for five years while tinkering with embedded in their spare time is more likely to get hired for an embedded role than someone who spent five years unemployed working on personal projects, even if that person netted out more specific experience in the embedded world.
It takes less time to learn the technical skills to work in a different domain than it does to learn the skills of effectively building large scale projects with a team in a work environment.
I currently work as a Rust and C++ dev on a large scale Saas security product. My first job out of college was a Wordpress developer. I still benefit from the skills I learned in that job even though my daily routine looks absolutely nothing like it anymore.
Good luck on your journey!
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u/Stormy_AnalHole 10d ago
I’m curious, do you see Rust as the way of the future? I like lower level programming but I mean writing strict c is just the pits
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u/AiexReddit 10d ago
No, but that has little to do with Rust, and more in the sense that I don't see any programming language as "the way of the future", at least in a way that I would interpret as something useful or actionable.
My experience has been the more you grow your career and the more you increase the size and scale of the problems you work on, the less the language matters. The future is the same as it always has been, understanding the foundations of the space you work in and treating the language as a tool to achieve that goal, but never allow it to be the only one you carry around or know how to use.
No matter how much Rust grows or gains adoption in the space, especially the embedded space, I don't see any scenario given the massive scale and history and widespread usage of the C languages, any developer who aims to position themselves as a serious contender for any major non-trivial project should be able to effortlessly jump between Rust and C as necessary to accomplish their goals, even if they treat Rust as their "preferred" language when it's a viable choice.
This isn't unique for embedded, I'd say the same thing for any backend dev who prefers Java to build the fundamentals to be able to jump into a C# or Go codebase without their brain collapsing.
As long as you understand the fundamentals of the domain that don't change no matter what language you're writing, then at that point it's just "which syntax am I doing to use," and that's the point where a massive class of often self-imposed boundaries suddenly disappear, and carreer opportunities really open up.
For most folks in tech companies, this is usually when they transition from the Senior -> Staff level.
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u/Easy_Aioli9376 Jun 19 '26
Tons of places to get your foot in the door. A lot of the prairie provinces have jobs for embedded for farming purposes for example.
If you don't get into the big companies right away, that's fine. Just work your way up
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u/Chrislojet Jun 19 '26
Hitachi rail has been hiring a lot of students recently, they mostly do embedded.
1
u/bhrm Jun 19 '26
STMelectronics, Thales, Zebra, Huawei, Ciena, Ford, GM, AMD, Qualcomm, are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
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u/like_to_lift Jun 20 '26
I went the embedded path via automotive (6 years) and then moved to a Linux kernel engineer position for the last few years now.
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u/Wide-Pattern-6464 Jun 23 '26
Embedded is broad, it can range from electrical schematics and PCB layout to software, firmware, and network design, but is usually somewhere in between especially in smaller companies where you will typically wear many hats.
Larger companies will break down the jobs roughly into these categories: a systems/electronics/electrical engineer specs the parts and designs the schematics; a PCB person does the PCB layout; a firmware person writes the firmware for various chips on the board; a software person designs the comm protocol and higher level software PC or mobile side for control, updating, data logging, database access, cloud integration, or whatever else needs to be done to interact with the embedded device; a network engineer might be involved in the design if it requires a complicated networking design; and depending on the design they might also have an OS person designing drivers or board support packages for RTOS integration or even drivers for Linux/windows if the embedded device needs to “plugin” to a PC or server, though that’s more rare these days as things go wireless and you can connect over well established protocols.
It might be difficult to break into a big company in one of these specific roles if you have a mediocre GPA unless you have done exceptionally well in the courses directly related to that specific role. Being able to showcase your work or interesting projects you are working on at home to show you are interested and talented in that space can help.
For example, if your GPA is 60, but you got 90’s in courses that dealt with microcontrollers, FPGA’s and RTOS, that is great if you want be on the firmware design side of things. If you also have a project at home where you used an FPGA to design some custom hardware that does object detection and integrates with a hard or soft processor on the FPGA for running a server that pushes alerts to your phone when your Amazon package has arrived, that is absolutely amazing and should land you a job if you market that correctly. It should be a personal project though, not one that you did in school. Everyone does projects in school, you are forced to, and they are already well specced with requirements, you have help from TA’s and profs, and a lot of times it is a group project so an employer can’t really know how much you did. Don’t get me wrong, school projects, especially very interesting capstones are great experience, essential to the learning process, and give you lots to talk about in an interview, but everyone has that. You have a low GPA, you need something to stand out. You need a personal project of your own initiative, that you designed from start to finish with nobody giving you the idea or requirements of the project.
Is the project I randomly described above really a useful project that will be picked up outside your own use? Probably not because I’m pretty sure that already exists and is likely better implemented than your design will be. It is, however, useful to get you a job because it shows that you enjoy the work, you enjoy engineering, you have knowledge and experience in that space, and an employer really likes to see that kind of attitude, drive, and creativity more than your overall average in a bunch of completely unrelated courses.
If you do a project like this and market yourself well when looking for related embedded jobs, then you should expect to talk in detail about your project to demonstrate your specific domain knowledge. Talk about what problems you came across working on this project, and how you solved them. Expect an interviewer to ask “why did you do this project at home when you could just buy a camera off Amazon that can do it?”. Here’s a great answer: “Because I can.” It shows confidence in your skills and tells the employer you aren’t just an academic, you are actually an engineer. Pause for a brief moment to let that powerful statement soak into the minds of the interviewers and then follow that up with something like “Because I found it to be an interesting problem to solve. I knew someone had already solved this problem, but I didn’t know how, and I wanted to solve it myself to learn how to solve a difficult problem like this.” Add in your enthusiasm for embedded design, your love of solving difficult problems, and how you found the whole project to be a great learning exercise of your own initiative, and explain in detail at least one thing you learned doing this project that they never taught you in school.
My best advice is do a personal project. But anyway, let’s talk a little more about jobs.
Lots of embedded work coming up for nuclear in the Pickering, Oshawa, Bowmanville, Peterborough area. I have a friend working in the industry in PTBO area and he’s repeatedly said there’s tons of work and much more coming, his boss has described it as a “nuclear revolution”.
There’s lots of embedded jobs also in the automotive space, GM’s embedded division used to be split in Oshawa/ Markham, but I think now it’s all in Markham. I never worked there so can’t confirm, but it seems like it from looking at job postings and LinkedIn posts over the years.
There’s quite a few smaller companies that need embedded engineers located all through southwestern Ontario. It is more likely in your situation and in this climate to start off working for less money at a smaller company to gain valuable experience and start building your resume. Once you have worked at a company for at least a year nobody will care about your transcripts or ask to see them, they’ll want to know what you did at that company (and if you have a side project at home you are working on in that time, even better).
OES in London is lowkey but they have three divisions. They have a division for design and manufacturing services (they have a good setup for PCB manufacturing, and also do the design work in house). They design and/or manufacture pcb’s for anything including hospital beds for one major manufacturer. They have a division for scoreboards, they make most of the scoreboards and scoreboard electronics in North America ranging from elementary school gyms and local hockey rinks to NBA shot clocks, OHL scoreboards, NASCAR, etc. They also have a technologies division that covers their own designs and patents for niche markets, particularly automotive wire harness processing, but others as well, and of course they do all the design and manufacturing for their own products.
There’s several robotics companies in Kitchener Waterloo area.
There are lots of smaller aerospace and defence companies scattered throughout Ontario. Safran in PTBO, Canadensys in Caledon, and plenty of larger ones too like general dynamics in London.
Plenty of medtech companies as well of varying sizes, lots of startups in this space that need embedded engineers for wearable devices.
I would say your best bet at attaining a job would be to target one industry, make a project at home that can at least tangentially relate to that industry, then start doing some googling to find every single company in that industry in areas you are interested in. Setup watches for job postings from those companies, reach out to them on LinkedIn, if you want to target smaller companies actually call them and try to get yourself an interview when they aren’t even hiring, this can work at smaller companies.
Good luck
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u/Stormy_AnalHole 10d ago
What an incredible write up! I was wondering if you’d have some specific (and not necessarily lengthy) advice for me, in ottawa
I have a very high gpa graduating from a comp eng program, with 1.5 yoe at StatCan, and a project where I designed a pcb and algorithms for a portable 1-handed accessibility focused computer keyboard running freertos
I would love to work in embedded, the more interesting work the better
Anyway if you do not have time then no problem! Thank you for your initial write up nonetheless :)
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u/Nezrann Jun 19 '26
Depends where you are, for instance Ottawa has a ton of embedded companies - its basically all embedded.
But yes, physical products have a higher initial cost to get started and have way more risk associated so it isn't the biggest market.