Preparing for an interview at Teco Westinghouse requires a shift in mindset from typical software engineering preparation. You must focus heavily on the physical realities of the systems your software will control, emphasizing robustness, deterministic execution, and hardware-software safety.

Hardware-Software Integration – You must demonstrate a deep comfort with physical hardware. Interviewers expect you to read schematics, analyze board layouts, and understand how firmware interacts with physical components like microcontrollers, DSPs, and FPGAs.

First-Principles Problem Solving – You will be evaluated on your ability to reason from foundational physics and electrical engineering principles. When faced with an ambiguous problem, avoid guessing; instead, break the system down to its core electrical and mathematical components.

Design for Reliability & Safety – In high-voltage and data center environments, software reliability is paramount. Be prepared to explain how you design fault-tolerant systems, implement fail-safes, and write deterministic code that behaves predictably under abnormal operating conditions.

Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration – Because you will work alongside mechanical, electrical, and power systems engineers, you must show that you can communicate technical software concepts clearly to non-software stakeholders and vice versa.

The interview process at Teco Westinghouse is thorough, highly technical, and designed to simulate the real-world engineering challenges you will face on the job. The company values deep technical competence, practical hands-on capability, and a collaborative, academic mindset.

The process begins with an initial HR vetting call to discuss your background, career goals, and alignment with the team's needs. This is followed by a technical one-on-one phone or video screen, which often takes the form of an open-ended, colloquium-style discussion. Rather than grilling you on syntax, the interviewer will delve deeply into engineering principles, asking you to explain the "why" behind your past design choices and exploring your foundational knowledge of electrical systems and embedded software.

If you pass the initial screen, you will move on to a practical, project-based assessment, which is typically a half-day test. This stage is highly practical and directly reflects daily work; you will be asked to review a physical board layout or write a functional module in Verilog or VHDL. The final stage is an intensive, in-person interview at the Round Rock, TX or Austin, TX facility, where you will present your technical solutions, meet the broader engineering team, and engage in deeper system-design discussions.

The timeline above outlines the typical progression from your initial contact to the final decision. Candidates should expect the technical screens to feel highly conversational and deep, focusing on engineering principles rather than quick-fire questions. Use the project-based phase to showcase your clean coding practices and meticulous attention to hardware constraints.

To excel in the Teco Westinghouse technical evaluations, you must understand the specific domains where the engineering team focuses their assessment.

Embedded Systems & HDL Design

This evaluation area focuses on your ability to write reliable, deterministic firmware and hardware description code that interfaces directly with physical electronics.

Be ready to go over:

• FPGA Design Flows – Synthesizing, placing, and routing designs, along with static timing analysis.
• Hardware Description Languages – Writing clean, synthesizable VHDL or Verilog for control logic.
• Embedded C/C++ – Developing low-level drivers, managing interrupts, and optimizing memory usage on microcontrollers or DSPs.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Multi-core DSP synchronization, real-time operating systems (RTOS) scheduling algorithms, and direct memory access (DMA) optimization.

Example scenarios:

• "Write a synthesizable VHDL module that implements a debouncing filter for a noisy digital input signal."
• "Explain how you would structure an interrupt service routine (ISR) to handle high-frequency sensor inputs without blocking the main control loop."

Board Layout & Hardware Co-Design

Software engineers at Teco Westinghouse do not work in isolation from the hardware. You must be able to collaborate on hardware design and identify potential integration issues early.

Be ready to go over:

• Schematic Reading – Quickly understanding circuit diagrams, signal flows, and component relationships.
• PCB Layout Principles – Identifying routing issues, ground planes, and decoupling capacitor placement.
• Signal & Power Integrity – Understanding the impact of noise, crosstalk, and electromagnetic interference on digital signals.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Differential pair routing, impedance matching, and thermal dissipation management for high-power switching devices.

Example scenarios:

• "Review this schematic and identify potential failure points or noise sources that could corrupt the analog-to-digital conversion process."
• "How would you write firmware to self-diagnose a hardware communication failure on a local SPI bus?"

First-Principles Engineering & Control Theory

This area evaluates your theoretical foundation. You must prove that you understand the mathematical and physical laws that govern the systems your code controls.