Experience

SimpliSafe

• United States
• Computers and Electronics Manufacturing
• 700 & Above Employee

• Senior Firmware Engineer

  • Dec 2020 - Present

  Am a member of the team that wrote the firmware for SimpliSafe's first battery-operated indoor camera, which had a successful launch in the summer of 2023. Worked mainly with C language STM32 firmware in the areas of I2C/SPI communication to various hardware devices such as microphones, LED drivers, and RF TX/RX modules. Also worked with higher level embedded Linux firmware using C++. Am a member of the team that wrote the firmware for SimpliSafe's first battery-operated indoor camera, which had a successful launch in the summer of 2023. Worked mainly with C language STM32 firmware in the areas of I2C/SPI communication to various hardware devices such as microphones, LED drivers, and RF TX/RX modules. Also worked with higher level embedded Linux firmware using C++.



AndPlus, an Ensono Company

• United States
• Software Development
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Firmware Engineer

  • Jan 2019 - Oct 2020

  Did design and coding for an internet-connected roof leak detection system. Roof sensors are connected to a set of three PIC32MX processors that use the Microchip MPLAB Harmony framework. Network interface is handled by an NXP LPC1768 running Arm Mbed OS. Interprocessor communication is performed via UARTs. Main concentration is on PIC firmware, including low-level drivers for SPI flash and SRAM devices. Implementation was in C for the PIC processor and C++ for the NXP processor. Added features to a hotel room automation system which used UDP over ethernet for wired communication, and Zigbee for wireless communication. Devices were based on STM32 and CC2530 microcontrollers. The goal was to increase security. Made modifications to the devices' firmware to detect Zigbee replay attacks, reject all counterfeit packets, and report attempted attacks to the site operator. Implemented elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) algorithm using ATECC508A crypto chip for secure communication between devices. Wrote scripts in Python to fully automate the new feature and regression testing. Show less



Western Digital

• United States
• Computer Hardware Manufacturing
• 700 & Above Employee

• Senior Technologist, Firmware Engineering

  • Jan 2016 - Dec 2018

  Responsible for the design and implementation of embedded firmware for five generations of enterprise-class solid-state drives (SSDs). Implemented RSA signature verification for firmware downloads to allow the SSD to be FIPS compliant. Feature guaranteed that the SSD would reject any non-authentic firmware upgrades. Designed and implemented a failure prediction feature (SMART) for the SSD which allowed it to report conditions which are indicative of impending failures. Designed and implemented a SPI NOR flash based file system which was used on three generations of SAS, SATA, and NVMe SSDs. Attention was given to fault tolerance to ensure that no file data was lost in the event of an untimely loss of power. Designed and implemented an event logging system which allowed the SSD firmware to capture events with four different severity levels into a circular log which could be extracted from the drive. This log was critical both for code development and for determining the cause of a failure at a customer site. Wrote tools to automate the firmware build and release processes, which sped up both processes and made them less prone to human errors. Made modifications to an existing firmware platform in order to support the hardware of the next generation SSD. Used an FPGA-based system for development and testing. Implemented customer-specific mode and log pages in order to meet the requirements for several enterprise customers. Member of Agile code development team participating in daily scrum meetings and Program Increment (PI) planning sessions. Show less



SanDisk®

• United States
• Semiconductor Manufacturing
• 700 & Above Employee

• Firmware Engineer

  • Jan 2013 - Jan 2016

  Company acquired by Western Digital. Company acquired by Western Digital.



SMART Storage Systems

• United States
• Computer Hardware Manufacturing
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Firmware Engineer

  • May 2010 - Jan 2013

  Company acquired by SanDisk. Company acquired by SanDisk.



Seagate Technology

• United States
• Computer Hardware Manufacturing
• 700 & Above Employee

• Firmware Engineer

  • Jan 2007 - May 2010

  Responsible for the design and implementation of embedded firmware for four generations of enterprise-class hard drives. Lead firmware engineer for two generations of hard drive products. Responsibilities included coordinating the firmware development tasks of other team members, building and releasing firmware, and various bug fixes. Designed and implemented a compression algorithm that reduced the size of a firmware image by 35%, which was necessary for it to fit into a non-expandable flash memory area. Designed and implemented a code load algorithm which reduced the firmware download time from seven seconds to under two seconds. Firmware was protected against corruption caused by loss of power while upgrading. Designed and implemented a feature which would automatically capture catastrophic firmware failure information, which increased the likelihood that the failure could be analyzed and fixed without obtaining the drive from the customer. Show less



Maxtor

• Algeria
• Appliances, Electrical, and Electronics Manufacturing
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Firmware Engineer

  • Jan 2003 - Jan 2007

  Company acquired by Seagate. Company acquired by Seagate.



Quantum

• United States
• IT Services and IT Consulting
• 700 & Above Employee

• Firmware Engineer

  • Oct 1999 - Jan 2003

  Company acquired by Maxtor. Company acquired by Maxtor.



Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

• France
• Telecommunications
• 700 & Above Employee

• Firmware Engineer

  • Jan 1988 - Oct 1999

  Technical lead engineer over a team of twelve software engineers. Responsible for the high-level design of an embedded firmware, real-time operating system platform that ran on a PowerPC based processor board. Modified the board support package of the LynxOS POSIX-compliant real-time kernel to work with hardware built by Alcatel engineers, and wrote several LynxOS device drivers. Produced embedded firmware for a SCSI tape controller board that had a Motorola 68360 processor and the pSOS+ real-time operating system. Responsible for flash EEPROM downloading and programming algorithms, tape controller state machine, and an event logging system. Designed and implemented a feature that booted a telecommunications system composed of over one thousand processor boards faster than it was booted previously. Reduced system boot time from almost a day to only two or three hours. Maintained and added enhancements to an inter-processor message delivery subsystem and a file management subsystem. Show less



General Dynamics

• United States
• Defense and Space Manufacturing
• 700 & Above Employee

• Firmware Engineer

  • Jun 1986 - Jan 1988

  Produced software written in 8080 assembly language for a portable device that downloaded flight programs to the F16 fighter plane. The software contained several device drivers that allowed the downloader to interface to the different computers on the F16. Produced software written in 8080 assembly language for a portable device that downloaded flight programs to the F16 fighter plane. The software contained several device drivers that allowed the downloader to interface to the different computers on the F16.