Senior Firmware Engineer, Platform
$195,000–$273,000 year
On-siteTorrance, California, United States
Torrance, California, United StatesOn-siteFull Time$195,000–$273,000 yearSenior LevelDefense TechnologyStartup
Full TimeSenior LevelStartupDefense Technology
Job Summary
Own the common runtime, libraries, and build system consumed by flight, ground-station, and autonomy teams across MCU and Linux targets. Design stable interfaces for SDKs and cross-compile toolchains while driving resource trade-offs for compute, memory, and bandwidth. Solve ambiguous problems at the intersection of the platform and consumer teams through code review and mentoring. Ship code directly while raising the firmware engineering bar via patterns and hands-on ownership.
Required Qualifications
- Mastery of embedded C on shipped products, with fluency across both MCU/RTOS and embedded Linux environments
- Have built platform code that other engineers depended on — libraries, SDKs, or protocols consumed by multiple teams — and kept them stable through change
- Hands-on ownership of an embedded build system (e.g. Bazel) — cross-compilation across multiple targets, dependency management, and build reproducibility
- Track record of owning problems that spanned team or subsystem boundaries and driving them to shipped resolution
- Strong resource-constrained design judgment — compute, memory, and bandwidth trade-offs on real hardware
- Debugging mastery — a history of cracking the bugs others gave up on
- Hands-on: you still ship code, and your technical influence comes from the work
Desired Qualifications
- Bazel specifically, especially for embedded/cross-compiled targets — or migrating a firmware org onto it
- Embedded Linux platform internals — kernel, BSPs, Yocto/Buildroot — alongside MCU work
- Flight-stack experience — Betaflight, PX4, or similar
- DSP, comms, or RF-adjacent firmware
- Visible open-source systems work
- You fly — FPV, RC, or drones generally
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