The UK IoT sector continues to grow, but the embedded engineers needed to build the products are hard to find. We share the skills in demand, the hiring challenges and how the market is evolving.

IoT Hiring Trends: What UK Companies Are Looking for in Embedded IoT Engineers

IoT product development sits at the intersection of embedded firmware, wireless connectivity, cloud integration and low-power hardware design. The engineers who can span all of these competently (the genuine IoT generalists) are among the most sought-after in UK embedded engineering.

The majority of IoT engineering roles we handle fall into one of two profiles: companies looking for strong firmware engineers who can own the device-side stack, and companies looking for embedded systems engineers who can work across hardware, firmware and connectivity layers.

In-demand skills across the IoT roles we fill:

• Wireless protocol experience: BLE (most common), Wi-Fi (ESP32 ecosystem), Zigbee, Thread/Matter, LoRaWAN, NB-IoT • ARM Cortex-M microcontroller development (Nordic nRF series and STM32 families dominate • FreeRTOS or Zephyr RTOS • Low-power optimisation) critical for battery-powered devices • OTA (over-the-air) update mechanisms and secure boot • MQTT, CoAP and understanding of cloud connectivity (AWS IoT, Azure IoT Hub)

A consistent theme in our IoT searches is that the strongest candidates have built or shipped a real product. When reviewing profiles, breadth of shipping experience is often more indicative of capability than formal qualifications.

Companies that attract and retain IoT engineers well tend to offer genuine ownership of the embedded stack, flexible working arrangements, and the opportunity to work on products that reach real users.