I've been speaking with Kanagarajan Palaniappan, currently a Principal Software Engineer at Leonardo, and I have to say he's one of the most impressive embedded systems engineers I've come across in a long time. With sixteen years of hands-on experience across defence, automotive, and industrial domains, he brings a level of depth and technical maturity that's genuinely rare in the market. He's measured, articulate, and clearly someone who takes real ownership of what he works on.

Kanagarajan's career has been built almost entirely around complex, safety-critical embedded development, and the standout example of his work is the real-time radar detection and vehicle protection software he designed at Leonardo, running on the AMD Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC platform. That kind of work sits at the intersection of hardcore low-level programming, real-time constraints, and high-stakes system reliability, and he's led it at a principal level. It speaks volumes about the calibre of problem he's been trusted to solve.

In terms of his technical stack, he works primarily in C and C++, with strong experience in Embedded Linux and FreeRTOS, ARM architectures, and Python for tooling and scripting. Day to day he operates at a level well beyond implementation, contributing to architecture decisions, mentoring colleagues, and engaging with system-level requirements from the outset. He described his approach to me as always wanting to understand the "why" behind a design decision before committing to it, which I think reflects well on how he's built his career.

As for his motivation, Kanagarajan has been candid with me that he's looking for a new challenge where he can continue working on technically demanding embedded problems, ideally within a team that values engineering rigour as much as delivery pace. He's based in Westcliff-on-Sea and is open to either hybrid or fully remote arrangements within the UK. He's on a one-month notice period, so he could be in place relatively quickly. I'd strongly recommend putting him in front of your engineering team, as I'm confident he'll impress.