[farbro]

I did a similar transition a few years ago. Used to work with higher-level system integration and web, now got a job as an embedded engineer at a company that makes lab equipment. They had a single embedded developer for the last 10 years who did everything himself, from scratch. We are now stuck with a gigantic monolithic code base where you need deep understanding in the details of the entire system, which makes it very hard to change or fix something.

The problem I struggle the most with is that this industry is 20 years behind compared to modern software development. Since embedded is tied to hardware, and these products have a long life cycle, innovation moves very slowly and there is little motivation to change something that works. I am used to automated pipelines, tests, modern debugging tools etc, and I feel extremely limited going back to a very manual workflow. The use of OSS is almost frowned upon.

I would advise to research what tech stack they are using at any possible new position. Make sure there is a team of embedded developers that work together (not individually on different products). I would look into embedded Linux and Zephyr.