Senior Firmware Engineer

About the role

You will be a key contributor to the embedded firmware design and implementation of all our hardware products: Spotter, Smart Mooring, next generation platforms, and Sofar’s new open hardware connectivity stack — Bristlemouth. You thrive in small and collaborative multidisciplinary teams, and are eager to pitch in to debug and solve gnarly issues. You take pride in your craft and strive to improve the health of our oceans and planet by shipping a cohesive, elegant, and impactful product. This role will be working onsite from our Pier 28 office at least 3 days per week and reporting to our Senior Engineering Manager.

Projects you’ll work on

• Building new Bristlemouth integrations for Spotter and Smart Mooring and evolving the open source Bristlemouth core APIs
• Collaborating cross-functionally to build new features on existing platforms
• Developing next generation platforms
• Advanced research and experiments with new and emerging technologies
• Integrated system testing, open ocean deployments, and occasional field testing (e.g., throwing things out of airplanes to see what breaks)

Responsibilities

• Design and implement efficient and maintainable FreeRTOS firmware with automated unit and integration tests in a mix of C and C++
• Break down complex efforts into parallelizable work streams for your team
• Implement host-side test, analysis, and automation tools in Python
• Participate in code reviews, brainstorms, and whiteboard sessions with your team
• Write crystal clear specifications and documentation for both external users and internal colleagues
• Work alongside electrical and mechanical engineers in designing, integrating, testing, and debugging systems
• Advocate for the highest leverage features and fixes in product prioritization conversations
• Execute frequent releases for internal proprietary firmware as well as open source Bristlemouth firmware, following test plans, building installers, writing release notes, and announcing releases in friendly and inviting communications for wide audiences

Requirements

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Strong systems thinking ability
• Solid foundation of software architecture principles
• At least 5+ years of professional embedded firmware/software experience
• Prior experience as a tech lead for a firmware team
• Fluent in embedded C and C++
• Comfortable in Python
• Experience with FreeRTOS
• Breadth of technology experience including multiple embedded platforms
• An understanding of common hardware peripherals and interfaces

Bonus qualifications

• Experience with multiple forms of radio telemetry
• Experience with IPv6 networking
• Experience with ARM Cortex-M0, M4, and M33 cores
• Past work in IoT, robotics, drones, and/or automotive products
• A passion for or connection to the ocean