Garmin embedded interview prep

Roles they hire for

• Wearable firmware engineer
• Sensor and GNSS firmware engineer

What they emphasise

• Multi-day battery life wearables
• GNSS and BLE
• Sensor fusion

Brush up on

Power budgetingSensor FIFOsGNSS basicsBLERTOS scheduling

How the rounds usually run

A typical consumer hardware loop for embedded roles. Companies vary by team and seniority.

Recruiter screen

• Background, role fit and logistics

Example: Walk me through your current project in two minutes.

Technical phone screen: C coding

• Live C coding: data structures, bit manipulation, memory
• Explaining your code and edge cases out loud

Example: Implement memmove and explain how you handle overlap.

Loop: embedded system design

• Architecture for a device feature end to end
• Power, memory and real-time trade-offs

Example: Design firmware for a wireless earbud's charging case.

Loop: RTOS, concurrency and debugging

• Scheduling, synchronization, priority inversion
• Hardware and software debugging with scopes and schematics

Example: Explain priority inversion and two ways to prevent it.

Hiring manager and behavioural

• Ownership, cross-functional work and judgement

Example: Tell me about a time you shipped under a hard deadline. What did you cut?

Practice questions

Original questions written for Garmin's focus areas, not leaked ones.

1. A watch must track GPS for 20 hours. Which subsystems sleep when, and how do you measure it?
2. Design sensor data collection that batches samples to save power.
3. How do you schedule tasks so the UI stays smooth while sensors run?
4. Explain how you'd test battery-life claims before launch.
5. How would you store an activity log so a crash never loses more than a minute of data?

Your prep playlist

Design rounds to practise

Themes are inferred from Garmin's public product lines.