Why One Engineer for Board, Firmware, and App?

Startups and small teams often hire an EE for the board, a firmware dev for the MCU, and a web dev for the dashboard. Handoffs between those roles are where delays and miscommunication multiply. One person who can own the full stack reduces that cost.

Benefits I’ve seen:

• Fewer meetings — No “the hardware can’t do that” surprise after the PCB is ordered. Constraints are known from the start.
• Faster iteration — Change a pin assignment, update the HAL and the UI in one pass instead of three tickets.
• Clear ownership — One person is accountable from schematic to deployed firmware to user-facing software.

The tradeoff is finding someone with depth in more than one domain. That’s the profile I’ve built: EE degree and board experience, embedded daily (Zephyr, nRF, ESP32), and a long history in full-stack and DevOps (Clue Media LLC). This blog will occasionally unpack how that combination plays out on real projects.