Member of Technical Staff - Firmware
On-siteSan Francisco, California, United States
Job Summary
Design, write, and maintain kernel-level drivers for actuators, motor controllers, and sensors across robot platforms. Build board support packages for compute modules including device trees, bootloaders, and kernel configurations. Integrate and wrangle sensor vendor firmware by evaluating protocols, debugging issues, and wrapping interfaces for DimOS. Own bus-level communication for CAN, EtherCAT, UART, SPI, I2C, Ethernet, and USB, ensuring timing and failure behavior under load. Maintain custom kernel builds with real-time requirements and make firmware work CI-able using HIL rigs and mocks. Write production PRs into the open-source DimOS repo under standard review bars.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of embedded systems design and development in production environments
- You have written kernel-level device drivers — for actuators, motor controllers, or comparable real-time peripherals — and shipped them. Not 'modified an example driver': designed, debugged, and maintained your own.
- Real-time reasoning: latency budgets, scheduling and priorities, bounded queues, and a clear answer for what happens when a deadline is missed (degrade gracefully, never silently)
- Bus and driver depth across CAN, UART, SPI/I2C, Ethernet, USB — written or substantially debugged, not just used
- Custom kernel experience: you've configured, patched, and built Linux kernels for embedded targets, and you can reason about what happens between interrupt and userspace
- You have built your own BSPs — device trees, bootloaders, Yocto or Buildroot pipelines — for boards that shipped
- Experience working with (and around) sensor vendor firmware: integration, protocol debugging, firmware updates, and vendor escalation
- Instrument-level debugging: oscilloscope, logic analyzer, JTAG/SWD, kernel logs. You have diagnosis stories from below the API
- Strong written English and comfort with fully async, distributed collaboration
Desired Qualifications
- Rust in production (our native layer is increasingly Rust), or embedded Rust curiosity backed by systems C/C++ depth
- NVIDIA Jetson depth: JetPack/L4T, kernel customization, power modes, thermal tuning
- PTP/time-sync across multiple compute units; timestamping discipline across clock domains
- OTA/fleet update systems (Mender, RAUC, SWUpdate), secure boot, provisioning
- Middleware internals — DDS, Zenoh, LCM, shared-memory transports
- Board-level literacy: you read schematics, talk to EEs fluently, and can specify a connector unsupervised
- Open-source contributions — kernel, U-Boot, Zephyr, Yocto layers, or anything we can read
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