I want to do firmware development, device driver development, and real-time embedded development. I'm particularly interested in doing this in the signal processing domain because I really like dealing with sensor systems and data.
My degree is electrical engineering, and I spent almost 10 years working a combination of hardware production support, test software development, signal processing algorithm development, and "big" real-time embedded code development. I left that world because of internal political issues (long-ish story).
Now I have spent 3 years in NLP R&D and that is what I get typecast as. Every "Who is hiring?" thread I see a bunch of companies with very interesting positions who might actually be willing to take a flier on me, but they are all in SF. In the past year I have only been able to get three companies to even talk to me about roles I actually want. One decided to pass because I was in Texas (they were in DC and very early stage) and I apparently wasn't strong enough to warrant relocation, and two I had to pass on because they hit me up at the exact wrong time (demo leadup crunch time).
I noticed on your linkedIn that you went to FAU - any interest in relocating back to the Boca Raton area? I'm hiring c# / .NET developers, which I know isn't exactly what you are looking for. We are a one year old start up working on making world-class cancer care accessible to more people and are finally bringing in our first full-time software dev. The first projects are going to be systems integration and internal tools work but we have the potential to move into some interesting data problems down the road (albeit still not within the lower-level realms you mention). My email is in my profile if you're interested.