Hire Vetted Specialists
Hire an IoT Firmware Engineer
Hire an IoT firmware engineer who has shipped a connected product end to end: the radio stack (BLE, Wi-Fi, LTE-M or NB-IoT), the power budget, secure boot, over-the-air updates, and the handshake with your app or cloud. Talent Badger's bench includes firmware specialists working across nRF52/nRF91, ESP32 and STM32 with Zephyr and FreeRTOS, available fractionally or per project.
What an IoT firmware specialist owns
- Radio bring-up and connection management: BLE GATT design, advertising and connection intervals, reconnect behavior, and Wi-Fi provisioning that survives a router change.
- Cellular low-power modes: LTE-M and NB-IoT power saving mode (PSM) and eDRX, tuned to how often the device actually needs to talk.
- A measured power budget: sleep current on the real board, duty cycling, and a battery-life estimate built from measurements rather than datasheet typicals.
- Secure boot and over-the-air updates: signed images, a bootloader-managed slot scheme (MCUboot is common on Zephyr), and rollback when an update fails mid-download.
- Production readiness: programming at the contract manufacturer, per-device identity and key provisioning, and locking the debug port before units ship.
Questions that show whether they have shipped connected hardware
- What was the measured sleep current on the last product you shipped, and how did you measure it? Listen for a power analyzer or a current-sense setup, not a guess.
- What happens if power is lost halfway through an OTA update? A good answer covers image verification, slot swapping and a recovery path.
- How do you provision certificates or keys at the factory, and who holds the signing keys?
- Which certifications did your last product go through, and how did using a pre-certified radio module change that work?
When fractional fits IoT work
- Connectivity, OTA and security decisions are front-loaded. Get that architecture right early and the application firmware can stay with your team.
- A specialist can own the radio and update path for a few months while a generalist on staff owns the product logic.
- Field issues after launch (dropped connections, battery complaints, a bad update) arrive in bursts and rarely justify a permanent seat.
Specialists on the bench
Božidar Kresaj
Connectivity Architect
Embedded C/C++ · STM32 / ARM Cortex-M · Linux / Yocto / BSP · Sensor Integration
Yahya Aouled Amer
Specialist
STM32 / ARM Cortex-M · RTOS (FreeRTOS, Zephyr, ThreadX) · Python · Embedded C/C++
Shuja Chaudhry
Board Architect
Analog Circuit Design · Digital Circuit Design · Power Electronics · Sensor Integration
Common questions
Either can ship a good product. Zephyr pairs naturally with Nordic parts, since Nordic's nRF Connect SDK is built on it, and brings a large driver and networking stack at the cost of a steeper learning curve. FreeRTOS is smaller and simpler and underpins Espressif's ESP-IDF. Choose based on your silicon and your team's experience.