TL;DR
- Hiring embedded developers offshore fails on hardware access, not on code quality. Decide who holds the boards before you agree a rate.
- Test for the things that cannot be faked: reading a datasheet, bringing up a board, and finding a fault with a debugger rather than with print statements.
- Run a paid trial on your real hardware with a real defect. A take-home exercise on a simulator tells you almost nothing.
- Ask which coding standard the team writes to. MISRA C and the functional safety standards above it change how the work is estimated.
- Write down who owns the firmware, the toolchain licences and the board files on the day the contract starts, not on the day it ends.
Overview
01
Why hiring embedded developers is a different job
Most offshore hiring advice assumes a web team. Push the branch, the pipeline builds, everyone sees the result within a minute.
Embedded work breaks that loop. The software runs on a board that sits on a desk somewhere. When it hangs, no stack trace arrives in a log aggregator. There is a device that stopped responding, and someone who has to walk over and look at it.
So the question hire offshore embedded systems developer is really two questions. Can these people do the engineering, and can they reach the hardware they are being asked to program.
Everything below is about answering the second one properly, because the first one is easier to test than most buyers expect. For the wider service view see our embedded software development page.
Skills
02
What to test for, and what to ignore
Years of experience on a CV predicts very little here. These six signals predict a lot.
Reading a datasheet
Give the team a peripheral they have not used and ask how they would configure it. Watch whether they open the reference manual or reach for a forum post, because one of those habits survives contact with a new chip and the other does not.
Board bring-up
Ask what they do first with a new board that shows no signs of life. A useful answer starts at power rails and clocks, not at the application code.
Debugging with instruments
A logic analyser trace or a scope capture in a bug report is a strong signal. Teams that debug only by adding print statements will stall on timing faults and on anything that disappears when you slow the system down.
Working inside limits
Ask what they did the last time they ran out of RAM or flash. The answer separates people who have shipped a constrained product from people who have only written application code on a device that never ran out of anything.
Update and recovery
Devices in the field need a way back from a bad image. Ask how they have handled firmware update before, and whether anything they shipped has ever been bricked by an update.
Secure boot and keys
If the product ships to customers, ask who holds the signing keys and where. For teams selling into the United Kingdom this becomes a procurement question rather than an engineering one.
What to ignore: the length of the technology list on the company website. Every embedded supplier lists the same protocols, and the list tells you nothing about whether the engineer assigned to you has used any of them.
Hardware
03
Who holds the boards
This is the question that decides the engagement, and it is missing from most contracts.
There are three workable answers. The boards stay with you and the offshore team reaches them over the network. Or you ship a set offshore. Or the work splits, with simulation and unit tests offshore and anything touching real hardware at your site.
Remote access is workable and it needs planning. That means a power switch the team can toggle and a serial console they can read. It also means a debugger they can drive over the network, and one person at your site for the day something physically unplugs itself.
Shipping boards has its own tax. Customs, export paperwork on anything with cryptography, and the wait when a revision changes and the offshore set is suddenly a generation behind the boards in your lab.
Ask how many hours a week the team expects to have hardware in front of them. If nobody has thought about the number, the estimate you are being given assumes hardware is always available, and it will not be.
Trial
04
Run a paid trial that tells you something
Interviews reward people who interview well. A short paid trial on your own hardware rewards people who can do the work.
- Pick a real defect you already understand. Something already fixed is ideal, because you know the answer and can judge the route they took to it.
- Give them the same access a new hire would get. Schematics, the repository, the toolchain and a board. Watching how they handle incomplete documentation is part of the test.
- Set a fixed budget and a fixed date. Two weeks is usually enough to see how someone works and short enough that both sides can walk away.
- Ask for the reasoning, not just the patch. The bug report matters more than the diff, because the reasoning is what you are buying for the next two years.
- Watch the questions they ask in week one. Good embedded people ask about clock configuration, power states and what the last engineer changed. Silence in week one usually means trouble in week six.
Pay for the trial. Free trials attract people with spare capacity, which is rarely the group you want.
Standards
05
Coding standards, safety and who owns what
Two questions here change the price, and buyers often ask them after the quote rather than before.
The first is the coding standard. MISRA C, published by the Motor Industry Software Reliability Association, is a set of guidelines for C that removes undefined and error-prone constructs, and the current edition is MISRA C:2012. Writing to it and proving compliance with a static analyser is real work, so a team quoting without knowing whether it applies is quoting for a different job.
Above the coding standard sit the functional safety standards: IEC 61508 for industrial systems, ISO 26262 for automotive, DO-178C for airborne software. These bring documentation, traceability and tool qualification, and none of that is absorbed into a developer day rate by accident.
The second question is ownership. Write down who owns the firmware, who owns the board files, who holds the toolchain licences, and what happens to all three if the relationship ends. Put it in the contract on day one, because the day you need the answer is the day the other side has the least reason to be helpful.
Engagement
06
Three ways to buy the same engineers
The shape of the contract matters more than the hourly rate.
| Shape | Fits when | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Dedicated team | Ongoing product work, a roadmap, firmware that keeps shipping | You pay for the seat whether or not you feed it work |
| Team extension | You have embedded engineers already and need more hands on the same codebase | Two coding styles in one repository if nobody owns conventions |
| Fixed scope project | A bounded piece with a clear finish, such as a driver or a certification push | Hardware surprises turn into change requests, and every change request is a negotiation |
Most product companies end up with a dedicated team once the work outlives the first project. Most first engagements should still be fixed scope, because it is the cheapest way to find out whether the working relationship is any good.
If you are weighing testing specifically rather than firmware, our guide to offshore test automation covers what to hand over and what to keep. If you are evaluating suppliers for a connected product, the checks in our guide to choosing an IoT application development company apply here too.
Working With Us
07
How Dev Station runs embedded engagements
We build firmware and device software as a standing team rather than a rented pair of hands. We take on board bring-up, the update path, the test rig and the application code.
Where a customer already has an integrator or a hardware house, we work to their schematics rather than pretending electronics is a software problem. Where the product needs a certification route, we agree the coding standard and the evidence trail before the first sprint, not after the audit is booked.
Our engineers work from Vietnam with overlap into UK GMT and US Eastern and Pacific hours, and we invoice in GBP or USD. Send us your schematic and the defect you cannot close and we will tell you what we would test first and whether the work needs a dedicated team at all.
FAQ
08
Frequently asked questions
What buyers ask before a first offshore embedded contract.
How do I hire an offshore embedded systems developer?
Test the engineering with a paid trial on your own hardware, then settle hardware access, coding standard and ownership in the contract. The engineering is the easier half to judge, because a two week trial on a real defect shows you most of what a CV cannot.
How do I hire a team for an IoT project?
Split the question by layer. Device firmware, connectivity and the cloud side are three different skill sets. A supplier strong in one is often weak in another, so ask which layer each named engineer has actually shipped.
Is embedded Linux development outsourcing different from bare metal work?
Yes, and the skills do not transfer cleanly. Embedded Linux brings kernel configuration, device tree work, drivers and a build system, while bare metal and RTOS work sits closer to the hardware and to timing. Ask which one the assigned engineer has done most recently.
What is the biggest reason offshore embedded projects fail?
The team cannot reach the hardware often enough. It shows up as slow progress rather than as a single failure, and it is why hardware access belongs in the first conversation rather than the first retrospective.
Sources
- MISRA C overview, checked September 2026
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