Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer – Imaging Systems

About the role

Urban Sky is seeking a Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer to own the firmware, imaging pipeline, and data-movement stack behind our electro-optical (EO) and infrared (IR) payloads – from the sensor at the focal plane to the command-and-control link on the ground. You’ll write the firmware that drives our cameras and edge compute, own the CUDA image processing pipeline that turns raw pixels into clean, calibrated, geo-tagged imagery, and architect the high-rate data paths and C2 infrastructure that connect the payload to the customer. Your goal: deliver clean, honest imagery. Much of this work proves out in the field – at events, exercises, and customer engagements.

Responsibilities

• Own embedded firmware for our EO and IR payloads: sensor bring-up, driver development, and edge compute on NVIDIA Jetson platforms
• Integrate cameras and sensors over PCIe, MIPI/CSI, and USB, and develop board-support packages for custom carrier boards, system-on-modules, and companion microcontrollers
• Own the L0 image processing pipeline running in CUDA at the edge: debayering, white balance, gamma, and camera/lens correction – applied to raw frames before any codec
• Own IR-specific processing: non-uniformity correction (NUC), bad-pixel replacement, and radiometric calibration
• Develop multi-frame super-resolution and related computational imaging capabilities
• Implement imagery metadata (KLV/MISB) so every frame carries accurate pointing, position, and time
• Architect high-throughput data paths across the vehicle – PCIe as a first-class specialty – and the routing infrastructure that carries imagery, telemetry, and C2 across satellite, tactical-radio, and IP links
• Optimize for latency, throughput, and determinism, and balance pipeline compute against onboard ML workloads sharing the same CUDA resources
• Integrate payload firmware with the gimbal and motion-control stack, consuming pointing and autonomy commands from the broader payload software architecture
• Develop and maintain optical calibrations for our EO/IR payloads – lens distortion modeling, vignetting/flat-field correction, and MTF/sharpness characterization – so imagery quality is measured and repeatable across cameras and flights
• Implement motion and temporal compensation (frame-to-frame registration, stabilization, and temporal filtering) to maximize effective image quality from a moving platform

Qualifications

• 5+ years developing embedded firmware in C/C++ for embedded Linux and/or bare-metal/RTOS systems
• Hands-on experience shipping on NVIDIA Jetson or comparable embedded Linux/SoC platforms
• Deep experience moving high-rate data over PCIe (driver, DMA, endpoint/root-complex level)
• Experience building end-to-end camera/imaging systems, from sensor to downstream consumer
• Working experience with image processing pipelines (debayering, calibration, correction) and CUDA or GPU-accelerated processing
• Solid grounding in networking, data routing, and command-and-control infrastructure
• Strong hardware debugging skills and comfort working from schematics
• Experience with optical calibration and characterization – distortion modeling, vignetting correction, MTF/sharpness measurement – and building the correction steps that apply them in a processing pipeline
• Familiarity with motion/temporal compensation techniques (registration, stabilization, temporal filtering) for imaging from moving platforms
• Must be US Citizen or Permanent Resident
• Must be able to obtain and maintain a US security clearance (an active clearance is a plus)
• Must be located near Denver, CO or willing to relocate; role is on-site at our Denver headquarters (4800 Race St)
• Travel expected to support field events, exercises, and customer engagements

Preferred Skills

• IR/thermal imaging experience, including NUC and radiometric calibration
• GStreamer, V4L2, or other imaging/video pipeline frameworks
• Computational imaging techniques (super-resolution, stacking, HDR)
• Defense imagery and metadata standards (MISB/KLV, STANAG); defense or mission-critical development experience
• FPGA workflows or high-speed serial interfaces (SerDes, Aurora, MIPI)
• Experience with optics and optical hardware
• RF, SATCOM, or tactical radio data link background
• Experience with multi-sensor and multispectral fusion – co-registering and combining imagery across sensors and bands into fused data products, in partnership with downstream data teams

Benefits

• Stock Options
• Medical, Vision and Dental
• Flexible PTO
• Cell Phone Bill Stipend

Pay

The pay range for this role is $140,000 - $180,000 USD per year (Denver CO HQ).