Ahmed Elsalahy

Joined as the fifth person in the company alongside the three founders, and was promoted from Senior Embedded Software Engineer to Team Lead in Sep 2023

Lead and support a 3-engineer embedded team, owning architecture, planning and delivery across all of the company's product lines, and ran technical interviews as the company grew to 35 people

Set the embedded roadmap and built the 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; a foundation the company went on to scale, selling the system to customers across Europe

Defined the shared architecture and the hardware/software design principles behind every Q*Bird product, built using Yocto and Rust, including a lean RAM-based filesystem and a systemd-based init system with a clean-cut kernel backed from source

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, plus a Rust FPGA-to-ARM interface pairing real-time high-speed control with slower, smarter calibration logic

Wrote the kernel drivers and the Rust user-space services (Tokio, Tonic, gRPC, Protocol Buffers) shared across all three product lines, and designed and helped implement the firmware for the quantum optical switch at the heart of every deployment

Wrote the SFP transceiver driver (SFF-8472 diagnostics over I2C), giving deployed systems live optical-link telemetry and alarms for signal loss and degraded links

Built and maintained 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

Wrote the dedicated firmware used for CE certification testing, taking the company 3 product lines through to a successful CE mark

Built reliable CAN communication with other sub-systems as part of the inverter (drivetrain) team, and implemented AUTOSAR functional safety requirements over CAN

Implemented the inverter diagnostics stack — UDS (ISO 14229) over CAN TP (ISO 15765) with AES secure access, services such as RDID, WDID and Routine Control, and firmware updates over CAN

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

Integrated the Catch2 (v3) unit testing framework to increase the maturity and quality of the inverter software, and supported the telematics team in delivering over-the-air updates

Built low-power LoRaWAN IoT reference designs (Generic Node) in close collaboration with ARM, Semtech, Microchip and STMicroelectronics, taken through to a 4,000-unit production run

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)

Wrote the dedicated firmware used for CE certification testing, taking the Generic Node through to a successful CE mark

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