Sr. Staff Embedded Applications Engineer, TinyML Lab
Job Description
Head Our Edge AI Prototyping Lab. Build Physical Rigs. Deploy TinyML on Silicon.
About the Role & The Reality AI Lab
The Renesas AIoT Center of Excellence in Columbia, MD (formerly Reality AI) is seeking a hands-on Senior Staff Edge AI Applications Engineer to lead our physical Edge AI Applications Lab.
In this role, you will head our physical lab facility, direct R&D; and proof-of-concept (PoC) hardware builds, manage project scheduling, and mentor junior engineers. You will operate at the exact intersection of small-scale physical fabrication, digital signal processing (DSP), C/C++ embedded firmware, and microcontroller-level TinyML deployment.
You will lead the end-to-end execution of non-visual sensing solutions - instrumenting physical hardware setups (industrial motors, automotive systems, consumer devices), collecting high-frequency time-series sensor data, building custom DSP pipelines, and optimizing tiny machine learning models to run on Renesas silicon.
Are you a Senior Embedded Engineer or Applied Physicist who thrives in a physical lab environment building custom sensor rigs, soldering prototype boards, and squeezing machine learning models onto microcontrollers?
ATTENTION APPLICANTS: READ BEFORE APPLYING
• This is a physical lab leadership and embedded hardware role.
• DO NOT APPLY if your background is strictly in Cloud AI, Data Science, Generative AI, LLMs, LangChain, or Web Backend APIs.
• DO APPLY if you have 7+ years of experience building physical prototype rigs, writing embedded C/C++, running FFTs on raw accelerometer/acoustic data, debugging SPI/I2C signals with an oscilloscope, and running TinyML on bare-metal silicon.
Key Responsibilities
• Lab Ownership & Technical Leadership: Manage physical lab facilities, equipment, part procurement, and project scheduling for customer PoCs, internal R&D;, and cross-BU hardware integrations.
• Physical Prototyping & Fabrication: Lead hands-on assembly of prototype rigs, sensor arrays, 3D-printed mounts, and microelectronic setups to capture real-world physical data.
• High-Frequency Sensor Data Engineering: Instrument physical systems to capture, clean, and preprocess high-frequency time-series datasets (acoustic, vibration, electrical, motor current).
• DSP & TinyML Deployment: Design DSP feature extraction pipelines (FFTs, spectral analysis, filtering) and deploy optimized, quantized TinyML models onto microcontrollers (ARM Cortex-M, Renesas RA/RX/RL78) using TFLite Micro, CMSIS-NN, or eIQ.
• Customer & Cross-BU Collaboration: Work directly with customers and internal product teams to ingest raw hardware telemetry, debug edge firmware issues, and demonstrate live hardware solutions.
• Team Mentorship: Lead, mentor, and guide junior lab engineers in firmware debugging, signal processing, and physical prototype fabrication.
Why Join Renesas?
• No SCIF / No Clearance: Enjoy complex signal processing and hardware challenges without defense contractor bureaucracy or classified workspace restrictions.
• Commercial Product Impact: What you build in our lab gets integrated into Renesas silicon and deployed into millions of industrial, automotive, and consumer devices globally.
• Startup Autonomy + Global Backing: Small-team environment (under 50 people in Columbia) backed by one of the world's premier semiconductor manufacturers.
Requirements
Function: Engineering
Experience Level: Mid-Senior Level