Mason Tucker Embedded Software Engineer
Cupertino, CA • embeddedeng@gmail.com • +1 4085-7777
Profile Summary
- Embedded Software Engineer with 8 years of experience delivering firmware for consumer wearable and audio devices across consumer audio, fitness wearables, and automotive infotainment, specializing in low-power firmware, RTOS scheduling, and peripheral driver development.
- Solid technical background across languages (C, C++), microcontrollers (ARM Cortex-M (STM32), ESP32), RTOS (Zephyr), peripheral protocols (I2C, SPI), wireless (BLE), debug tooling (J-Link), and build systems (CMake) with strong fundamentals in datasheet fluency, signal-level debugging, and tight memory and power budgets.
- Deep expertise in resource-constrained firmware design, deterministic real-time scheduling, hardware abstraction layers, and ultra-low-power operation, leveraging methodologies such as MISRA C and code-review discipline and hardware-in-the-loop testing to drive reliable, certifiable, field-proven firmware.
- Engaged collaborator working cross-functionally with Hardware, Mechanical, and QA teams in hardware-led product development environments, contributing to design reviews, EVT/DVT/PVT gates, and post-incident retrospectives with a pragmatic, ownership-first mindset.
- Emerging leader who shares technical excellence and fosters a culture of firmware rigor and datasheet-grade documentation through PR reviews and runbooks, while leading firmware-engineering guild sessions and authoring widely adopted bring-up and driver templates.
Technical Skills
- Languages:
- C (C99/C11), C++ (C++14/17), Rust (no_std), assembly (ARM Thumb), Python (host-side tooling)
- Microcontrollers & Processors:
- ARM Cortex-M0/M3/M4/M7, STM32, ESP32, Nordic nRF52, NXP i.MX RT, AVR, RISC-V
- RTOS & Bare-Metal:
- Zephyr, FreeRTOS, ThreadX, VxWorks, bare-metal C, startup code, linker scripts, ISRs
- Peripheral Protocols:
- I2C, SPI, UART, USB, CAN, LIN, Ethernet, GPIO, ADC/DAC, PWM, DMA, I2S
- Wireless & Connectivity:
- BLE, Wi-Fi (ESP-IDF), LoRa, Zigbee, Thread, Modbus, MQTT, Automotive Ethernet
- Debug & Hardware Tools:
- J-Link, ST-Link, Lauterbach, GDB, OpenOCD, Saleae logic analyzer, oscilloscope, JTAG/SWD
- Build, Toolchains & OTA:
- GCC ARM, Clang, CMake, Make, PlatformIO, Yocto, Git, OTA firmware updates, secure boot
- Testing & Compliance:
- Unity, Ceedling, HIL testing, MISRA C, ISO 26262 (automotive), IEC 62304 (medical), DO-178C (aerospace)
Education
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
Work Experience
Apple
Senior Embedded Software Engineer
- Owned firmware development for next-generation wearable audio devices across 3 product generations, leading the firmware stack across application firmware, audio DSP integration, and sensor fusion pipelines shipped on 40M+ shipped units.
- Drove hardware-software integration with EE counterparts through board bring-up from schematics and datasheets, register-level driver design with EE counterparts, and signal-integrity triage on prototype boards, bringing up 14 PCB revisions and 4 SoC silicon spins on schedule.
- Designed the RTOS-based firmware architecture on Zephyr orchestrating 40+ concurrent tasks, applying priority-inheritance mutex design, deterministic ISR-to-thread handoff, and stack-watermark and starvation profiling, cutting worst-case scheduling jitter from 180 µs to 22 µs.
- Authored peripheral driver development across 22 drivers including DMA-backed I2C and SPI sensor stacks, I2S audio codec drivers with circular buffers, and USB CDC and HID class implementations, sustaining 48kHz, 24-bit lossless audio end-to-end.
- Led firmware performance and power tuning via tickless idle and selective peripheral clock gating, ISR latency reduction via cache-friendly hot paths, and link-time-optimized binary and section pruning, lifting battery life from 22 hours to 34 hours while reclaiming 148 KB of flash.
- Owned the wireless connectivity stack delivering BLE GATT services for pairing and audio routing, multi-link role coordination across 3 paired devices, and OTA firmware update protocol with rollback, sustaining up to 3 paired hosts at 99.6% measured field connection rate.
- Drove hardware-level debugging with JTAG/SWD breakpoints via J-Link with GDB, logic-analyzer captures of I2C and SPI traffic, and oscilloscope timing analysis on critical signals, root-causing 32 escaped field bugs and cutting debug-cycle time from 3.2 days to 9 hours.
Garmin
Embedded Software Engineer
- Owned bare-metal startup and bootloader development including custom linker scripts and section layout, A/B-slot bootloader with signature verification, and memory-mapped I/O drivers without an OS, keeping the bootloader under 8 KB and hitting 240 ms cold boot across the fitness watch line.
- Built the firmware test and certification program including Unity and Ceedling unit tests on host, hardware-in-the-loop suites against bench fixtures, and MISRA C static analysis and coverage gates, reaching 86% MC/DC branch coverage and earning ISO 26262 ASIL-B certification on the automotive nav line.
- Modernized the cross-compilation and OTA pipeline using GCC ARM and CMake reproducible builds, signed OTA update channels with staged rollout, and GitHub Actions firmware CI matrix, cutting full-product build time from 38 minutes to 6 minutes and shipping 28 OTA releases without rollback.
- Worked closely with Hardware, Mechanical, and Industrial Design teams across 6 fitness and automotive product lines to coordinate schematic and BOM reviews, mechanical thermal envelopes, and manufacturing test fixtures, authoring 11 firmware design RFCs that shaped the org's firmware standard and onboarding 4 new firmware engineers.