Ahmed Elsalahy

Lead and support a newly formed 3-engineer embedded team, owning architecture, planning and delivery across all of the company's product lines

Ran every technical interview across the engineering domains as the company grew to 35 people

Defined the shared architecture and the hardware/software design principles behind every Q*Bird product, built on Yocto, PetaLinux and Rust, including a lean RAM-based filesystem and kernel I wrote from the ground up

Developed the 24/7 embedded Linux services that abstract the hardware and drive the RFSoC (10 GSPS DACs, 5 GSPS ADCs) and the optical chain, handling high-speed data acquisition, processing and control

Built a seamless Rust FPGA-to-ARM interface for controlling the fabric and fetching buffered data, combining real-time high-speed control with slower, smarter calibration logic

Wrote the kernel drivers and the Rust user-space services using Tokio, Tonic, gRPC and Protocol Buffers

Designed and helped implement the firmware for the quantum optical switch, the single point of failure in every deployment, making the system scale without giving up performance or reliability

Built and still run the in-house Jenkins and Azure pipeline that runs hardware-in-the-loop tests across a €100K+ fleet of boards

Led the design of a high-speed Xilinx Zynq RF board on a €150K R&D budget, scaling production in Taiwan to 15 boards in the latest run and raising yield with hardware-in-the-loop validation on site

Joined as the fifth person in the company, alongside the three founders

Defined the embedded milestones for the product, turned them into a clear technical roadmap and started building against it

Built the embedded software from the ground up for Q*Bird's first product, delivered to our launch customer, the Port of Rotterdam, on an ambitious MVP timeline

Brought two embedded engineers into the company to meet that timeline, and was promoted internally to Embedded Software Team Lead

Laid a reliable foundation that the company went on to scale, successfully selling the system to customers across Europe

Built reliable CAN communication with other sub-systems as part of the inverter (drivetrain) team

Implemented AUTOSAR functional safety requirements over CAN

Integrated the Catch2 (v3) unit testing framework to increase the maturity and quality of the inverter software

Added CAN driver support for (statically allocated) FIFO queues and ISO 11898 interfaces

Integrated UDS CAN ISO TP 15765 and ISO 14229 diagnostics stacks

Implemented inverter diagnostics services such as RDID, WDID and Routine Control

Added diagnostics secure access support for the inverter using AES

Implemented inverter firmware updates over CAN

Supported the telematics team in delivering over-the-air software updates

Built low-power LoRaWAN IoT reference designs (Generic Node) in close collaboration with ARM, Semtech, Microchip and STMicroelectronics

Integrated ATECC608A Microchip secure elements into various LoRaWAN stacks

Designed and implemented firmware updates over the air (bootloader and update client) for Microchip SAMR34 and STMicroelectronics STM32WL

Designed and implemented OS and bare-metal compatible sensor drivers (qtouch, accelerometer, temperature, humidity and time-of-flight sensors)

Integrated our board support package with multiple operating systems (Mbed OS, Azure RTOS (ThreadX), FreeRTOS)

Validated requirements for Valeo radar sensors in Geely and Volvo production cars

Developed firmware for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test benches used on Valeo driver-assistance products

Worked with GM, Audi and Daimler to develop firmware for a HIL test bench

Optimized the performance of CAN, FlexRay, SPI and Ethernet drivers

Developed quad-core compatible firmware