Electrical Engineer – Firmware

About the role

Arrive AI is hiring a Electrical Engineer – Firmware to own the low-level software that brings our next-generation autonomous delivery hardware to life. This is a new-product role: you will write firmware for boards that are still on the bench, work directly alongside the electrical engineers designing them, and carry designs from first power-on through validated, repeatable operation.

Responsibilities

• Firmware Architecture & Development
• Design, implement, and maintain firmware for microcontroller-based subsystems across multiple concurrent hardware programs
• Author and own hardware abstraction layers that let application logic survive board revisions and silicon changes
• Write device drivers for sensors, actuators, motor controllers, power management, and communication peripherals
• Design and tune RTOS task structures, priorities, and IPC for deterministic, real-time behavior
• Make and defend architectural tradeoffs around memory footprint, power budget, latency, and fault tolerance
• Bring-Up & Prototyping
• Take new PCB designs from first power-on through peripheral validation, working from schematics, datasheets, and reference manuals
• Partner with electrical engineers during design reviews to catch firmware-hostile decisions before boards are fabricated
• Build the bench tooling, harnesses, and test fixtures that make prototype iteration fast
• Support hardware evaluations and component bake-offs with the instrumentation and measurements needed to decide on evidence rather than opinion
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Define clean interfaces between firmware and the network, platform, and edge compute layers so teams can move independently
• Work with platform software engineers on data flow between firmware, edge compute, and cloud services
• Shift low-level software work off the electrical engineering team so EE capacity stays on EE problems
• Mentor teammates on embedded practice, and help grow embedded Rust and firmware capability across the group
• Testing, Debugging & Reliability
• Develop firmware test plans spanning unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop testing
• Debug on real hardware with JTAG/SWD, logic analyzers, and oscilloscopes — including the intermittent, timing-dependent, and only-on-this-one-board failures
• Improve observability through structured logging, telemetry, and on-device diagnostics
• Design for graceful degradation: watchdogs, fault recovery, safe states, and brownout behavior
• Documentation & Best Practices
• Document firmware architecture, hardware interfaces, register maps, and bring-up procedures clearly enough for the next engineer
• Contribute to coding standards, code review culture, version control practice, and firmware release management
• Help establish repeatable build, flash, and provisioning processes as programs move from prototype toward production

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of professional experience developing firmware for embedded systems
• Deep proficiency in C/C++ for resource-constrained targets — memory models, pointers and aliasing, interrupt handlers, concurrency hazards, and the failure modes that come with them
• Hands-on production experience with an RTOS (Zephyr, FreeRTOS, ThreadX, or similar) and/or bare-metal systems
• Demonstrated experience designing or maintaining hardware abstraction layers, not only consuming vendor-supplied ones
• Fluency with embedded communication protocols: UART, SPI, I²C, CAN, Ethernet
• Proven track record debugging firmware on real hardware with hardware debug tools
• Ability to work independently from datasheets and reference manuals, and to be productive on unproven hardware where the bug could be in your code, the board, or the part
• Demonstrated ability to perform advanced PCB/board design, in addition to writing low-level/base firmware for the boards they design

Preferred Qualifications

• Embedded Rust experience — no_std development, embedded-hal, and async or concurrency frameworks such as Embassy or RTIC
• Zephyr RTOS specifically, including devicetree and its driver model
• Electrical engineering background, or enough comfort with schematics and instrumentation to contribute in hardware design reviews
• Experience bridging Rust and C via FFI, or integrating firmware components written in different languages behind a defined interface
• Familiarity with ARM-based microcontrollers and SoCs, and with Linux-based embedded systems
• Exposure to robotics, IoT, motion control, or autonomous systems
• Understanding of secure boot, OTA firmware updates, and device lifecycle management

A Note on Rust
Our embedded software is written in Rust. Previous Rust development experience is not a hard requirement for this role, however, hands-on experience with and mastery of embedded C programming is. If you are willing to learn and have the background, we will provide the training and support you need.