AURORA Embedded Engineer Interview Guide 2026

What is an Embedded Engineer?

An Embedded Engineer at Aurora designs and delivers the software that runs on the computers controlling our autonomous vehicles. Your work bridges real-time control, safety-critical systems, and a modern C++ autonomy stack to translate high-level planning into precise, reliable vehicle actuation. You will build software that manages operating modes, fault strategies, and health monitoring—directly influencing how the Aurora Driver behaves on-road.

This role is central to the success of the Aurora Driver. You will collaborate across autonomy planning and control, embedded layers, and vehicle platform interfaces to ensure stable, deterministic behavior across multiple hardware devices. Expect to interact with Linux and RTOS environments, NVIDIA Orin/Thor platforms, DRIVE OS, CAN/Ethernet networking, and HIL/vehicle-level testing frameworks. The impact is immediate and visible: your systems keep fleets safe, predictable, and performant in diverse real-world conditions.

What makes this role compelling is the blend of deep systems work with mission-critical robotics. You’ll implement device drivers, secure boot, diagnostics, and firmware updates—even as you shape frameworks and tools that accelerate testing to safety coverage standards. The problems are complex and multidisciplinary, and the solutions you develop will scale across platforms and vehicle programs.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Focus your preparation on the realities of building, integrating, and validating embedded software that runs in safety-critical, resource-constrained environments. You will be assessed on your ability to reason about real-time behavior, design robust interfaces, write modern C++/C for embedded targets, and collaborate effectively across autonomy, hardware, and platform teams.

Role-related Knowledge (Technical/Domain Skills) - Interviewers assess your depth with C/C++, RTOS/Linux, device drivers, NVIDIA DRIVE OS, and robotics frameworks (e.g., ROS 2/DDS). Demonstrate fluency with embedded tooling, boot/bring-up, CAN/TCP/IP, and debugging on-target. Show familiarity with safety practices (e.g., MISRA, static analysis) and how they influence design choices.
Problem-Solving Ability (Approach & Rigor) - You’ll be judged on how you decompose ambiguous embedded issues under constraints: latency budgets, CPU/memory limits, and real-time deadlines. Walk through tradeoffs, provide structured thinking, and quantify impacts (e.g., ISR latency, queue depth sizing, watchdog timeouts).
Leadership (Influence Without Authority) - Aurora values engineers who drive clarity in complex cross-functional spaces. Show how you set interfaces, insist on testability, write high-signal design docs, lead postmortems, and improve team velocity through tools, frameworks, or processes.
Culture Fit (Safety, Collaboration, Ownership) - Expect questions about working in ambiguity, prioritizing safety, and partnering with autonomy, hardware, and validation. Demonstrate ownership, a bias for factual debugging, and an evidence-based approach to risk management.

Note

This is a safety-critical domain. Be ready to justify design choices with quantitative reasoning (deadlines, jitter, coverage targets) and to reference standards, guidelines, or test evidence that back your decisions.

Interview Process Overview

Aurora’s process is designed to simulate the decisions and constraints you will face on the job. You’ll encounter a mix of coding exercises, design discussions, and scenario-based debugging that replicate real embedded development and integration with autonomy planning/control. The pacing is purposeful and rigorous, with a focus on practical reasoning, clarity of communication, and safety-minded tradeoffs.

Expect interviews that move fluidly between systems thinking and implementation detail. You may be asked to reason about control loop timing on mixed Linux/RTOS systems, walk through a bring-up plan for a new board, or design a fault-management state machine. The interviewers value thoughtful documentation, clean interfaces, and evidence of test strategy—alongside readable, modern C++/C that behaves deterministically.

The philosophy is outcomes-driven: demonstrate how you ensure correctness under real-world variance—electrical noise, packet loss, sensor dropouts, CPU contention, and thermal constraints. Interviewers look for engineers who elevate adjacent teams by defining robust interfaces, creating automation, and making validation measurable.

Tip

Aurora interviews emphasize practical realism over puzzle-solving. Prioritize code clarity, determinism, and testability. If you need assumptions, state them explicitly and confirm alignment with your interviewer.

This timeline visual shows the typical flow from recruiter conversations to technical screens, deep-dive design rounds, and cross-functional evaluations. Use it to plan preparation sprints, align your examples to each stage, and budget time for hands-on practice between interviews. Keep notes on assumptions and decisions—you’ll often build on earlier discussions in later rounds.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Embedded Systems & Modern C/C++ Fundamentals

This area evaluates your ability to write correct, efficient, and maintainable embedded code that runs predictably under constraints. Expect to implement or review C/C++ for microcontrollers and embedded Linux targets, reason about UB, and discuss interfaces, memory layout, and testing.

Be ready to go over:

Memory & Concurrency: stack/heap tradeoffs, lock-free vs. mutexed paths, ISR-safe code, ring buffers, atomics, and memory ordering.
Embedded C++ Practices: RAII, strong typing, error handling without exceptions on constrained targets, templates vs. compile-time config.
Testing Strategy: unit tests on host, on-target tests, fault injection, and CI coverage for embedded libraries.
Advanced concepts (less common): MISRA C/C++ rationale, zero-copy pipelines, cache effects/NUMA, profile-guided optimizations, MC/DC coverage.