Systems Software Engineer

Overview

Aquent is partnering with a leading technology company at the forefront of innovation, dedicated to shaping the future of computing. This is an unparalleled opportunity to join a pioneering team and make a profound impact on the security posture of critical hardware ecosystems. You will play a pivotal role in developing a next-generation platform that leverages cutting-edge AI, compiler technology, and automated fuzzing to secure firmware at scale, transforming how vulnerabilities are identified and mitigated across the industry.

About the Role

Step into a dynamic engineering role where your expertise will directly contribute to building and advancing a groundbreaking firmware security analysis platform. This platform addresses a critical industry challenge by automating the rigorous analysis of third-party firmware, ensuring a robust security posture across a broad ecosystem of hardware and firmware providers. You will be instrumental in bridging research ideas with production-quality engineering solutions, working alongside security researchers, compiler engineers, and platform developers.

This role offers a unique chance to work across multiple layers of the technology stack, from low-level compiler infrastructure to modern AI-assisted development workflows. You will contribute to long-term technical strategy and platform evolution, driving innovation that secures critical firmware ecosystems through advanced analysis technologies.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and enhance security analysis pipelines, including developing preprocessing pipelines for C/C++ firmware code into Intermediate Representation (IR).
• Implement and maintain IR-based transformations to prepare firmware for off-target analysis and fuzzing.
• Create and improve code-analysis workflows, encompassing call-graph extraction, metadata generation, and static-analysis integrations.
• Design and maintain systems for generating and executing fuzzing campaigns using modern frameworks and AI-assisted techniques.
• Improve crash triage systems for automated identification, deduplication, and analysis of security findings.
• Develop automated mechanisms to classify code semantics and enhance analysis accuracy.
• Build scalable automation combining compiler infrastructure, security tooling, and AI-driven workflows.
• Enhance vulnerability detection pipelines and reduce false positives through improved analysis techniques.
• Improve reporting systems to transform raw security findings into actionable engineering insights.
• Validate analysis approaches across diverse firmware targets and environments.
• 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.
• 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.

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.

Must-Have 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, IR, 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.

Nice-to-Have 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 large language model technologies into engineering workflows.
• Previous open-source contributor or maintainer experience.
• Experience building CI/CD pipelines and release automation.
• Familiarity with GitHub or similar development platforms.

About Aquent:

Aquent connects the best talent in marketing, creative, and design with the world’s biggest brands.

Our eligible talent get access to amazing benefits like subsidized health, vision, and dental plans, paid sick leave, and retirement plans with a match. We also offer free online training through Aquent Gymnasium. More information on our awesome benefits!

Aquent is an equal-opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics. We’re about creating an inclusive environment-one where different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are valued, and everyone can contribute, grow their careers, and thrive.