Software Engineer - Embedded Systems (Cleared)

About Swoop

Swoop Technologies has a mission to organize and make accessible the world’s military and critical infrastructure. We are building a distributed operating system, SwoopOS, that decomposes the world’s equipment into a distributed robotic embodiment upon which a new generation of distributed systems, autonomous systems, and agentic AI can be built and deployed using our SDK, Valhalla, and operated via our browser, Surf. Imagine the world’s equipment—consisting of the electrical grid, communications architectures, manufacturing facilities, and militaries—as a trapped supply of inputs possessing the potential to ensure Western military advantage, sovereign control of economically competitive manufacturing capacity, or the creation of a grid that fosters energy dominance. Swoop is liberating these trapped assets, allowing them to contribute to the world’s future as a series of building blocks to be combined at the speed of software, limited only by the hard constraints of physics and the soft constraints of safety.

Impact

Joining our Edge Team means you will work on building a legitimate distributed operating system—not an abstraction, virtualization, or data layer. This OS must operate across heterogeneous instruction sets, support a new generation of distributed system abstractions, treat security as a first principle, and scale to power grids and entire militaries. You will influence the intersection of artificial intelligence, robotics, and the physical world, building a compute model the OS schedules and executes across geopolitically relevant problem sets. Every team member contributes tangibly on a daily basis.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain embedded system firmware including low‑level drivers, bootloaders, and other OS‑critical functions to enable reliable OS initialization and hardware interaction.
• Contribute to OS integration and kernel‑level modules, ensuring efficient communication between hardware abstraction layers and higher‑level system software.
• Design and implement application‑layer features and system services that leverage firmware interfaces, optimizing for performance, resource use, and robustness.
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with other engineering teams to debug complex issues spanning firmware, operating system, and application boundaries.
• Collaborate closely with the deployment engineering team, solving technical challenges for various customer requirements.

Requirements

• Active Top Secret US Clearance with SCI eligibility.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent technical experience.
• 4+ years of experience in one or more of the following: Operating System/Kernel development, RTOS, Embedded Systems/Firmware design, Microkernel development, Bare Metal development.
• Software development experience in C and Rust.
• Understanding of low‑level hardware systems.
• Travel requirement: 5–20%.

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of one or more of the following: microcontrollers, SoC, device drivers, hardware bring‑up, power management, ARM processors, performance optimization, file systems, bootloading, firmware, x86 assembly, system BIOS, FPGAs, or hardware/software integration.
• Understanding of clocks and timing as it pertains to processor instructions.
• Familiarity with serial protocols such as I²C, SPI, UART, and USB.
• Demonstrated knowledge of systems engineering and distributed systems.

Pay

Compensation Range: $130K – $190K