Berlin definitely also has a hardware engineering/embedded software scene. It's just that there is no single big company (or cluster of big companies) that domi

Berlin definitely also has a hardware engineering/embedded software scene. It's just that there is no single big company (or cluster of big companies) that dominates the market, but rather smaller shops that mostly do contract work or have some specialised product. There is also a steady supply of students from that branch of tech - AFAIK AutoNOMOS Lab still exists and there are multiple universities in town that over computer science focused on embedded systems.