Firmware Engineer, Robotics

Responsibilities

• Rapidly bring up new hardware and set execution pace for the team.
• Lead firmware architecture for embedded systems spanning boot, RTOS/runtime behavior, peripheral control, power management, communications, and field diagnostics.
• Define engineering standards for reliability, fault tolerance, observability, and maintainability across the firmware stack.
• Design and review safety-critical mechanisms, including fault detection, recovery paths, watchdog strategies, redundancy where appropriate, and safe-state behavior.
• Build quick, scrappy prototypes when speed of learning matters, then harden the right ideas into production-quality systems.
• Partner closely with engineers in hardware, software, and AI research from early prototype through production.
• Build rigorous bring-up, validation, and release processes for embedded platforms.
• Establish testing strategies across unit, hardware-in-the-loop, integration, stress, and failure-injection testing.
• Drive root-cause analysis for subtle hardware, firmware, and system interactions.
• Make clear tradeoffs across performance, memory, power, schedule, and safety.
• Mentor firmware engineers and help shape a culture of urgency, technical rigor, practical judgment, and high-quality execution.

Requirements

• Extensive experience developing firmware in an iterative environment.
• Experience bringing up new hardware and taking end-to-end ownership.
• Led architecture and delivery for complex embedded products that shipped to real users or operated in demanding production environments.
• Deep fluency in low-level languages (Rust) and comfortable working close to hardware under real-time constraints.
• Strong understanding of embedded systems from first principles, including interrupts, scheduling, memory layout, buses, DMA, timing behavior, and failure modes.
• Strong instincts for defensive design, fault containment, validation depth, and post-deployment diagnosability.
• Ability to communicate clearly across disciplines and turn ambiguity into sound technical direction.
• Experience making heavy use of AI-assisted coding systems (Codex, Claude Code, or similar) to accelerate implementation, prototyping, debugging, and iteration.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Rust in embedded environments.
• Experience with Embassy or other async embedded Rust frameworks.
• Familiarity with mixed-language firmware architectures, including introducing Rust incrementally into existing C/C++ systems.
• Experience with ARM Cortex-M or Cortex-R platforms, RTOSes, and low-power embedded designs.
• Experience building firmware for sensor-rich, latency-sensitive, or tightly integrated electromechanical products.