Engineering Manager – Camera Firmware Platform

Verkada•San Mateo, CA

9d•$200,000 - $315,000•Onsite

About The Position

Verkada is hiring an Engineering Manager for its Camera Firmware Platform team, which owns the storage and cross-cutting firmware foundation used by Verkada cameras. The team develops systems that make the camera fleet more reliable, faster, leaner, and more power-efficient, including on-camera storage and firmware capabilities such as boot and shutdown, memory and power management, device-state orchestration, IPC, observability, and firmware updates. The manager will lead a highly technical team of storage and embedded systems engineers responsible for firmware reliability, performance, power, and stability across a fleet of more than 1.8 million devices. The role sets the storage and platform roadmap and drives measurable improvements in footage retention, storage endurance, boot time, memory headroom, power draw, and crash rates. It combines technical leadership with people management and close collaboration across Camera Firmware, Hardware, Streaming, Computer Vision, Cloud Infrastructure, Security, Manufacturing, Product, and Verkada Linux. The role is based onsite at Verkada’s headquarters in San Mateo, California, with a requirement to work onsite five days per week. The position is full-time. The estimated annual on-target earnings range is $200,000–$315,000 USD.

Requirements

BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
8+ years of software engineering experience in embedded or systems software.
2+ years leading or managing high-performing systems, storage, platform, or infrastructure teams.
Experience designing storage systems for continuous, high-throughput write workloads, such as video recording.
Strong systems programming expertise in C/C++.
Hands-on experience profiling and optimizing system-level performance, memory, and power on resource-constrained devices.
Experience designing concurrent userspace services and IPC mechanisms, such as shared memory, sockets, and message queues, and reasoning about their trade-offs.
Experience debugging complex OS or storage issues in production across large deployed fleets.
Demonstrated success driving technical strategy and aligning multiple teams around shared platform investments.
Excellent communication skills and ability to influence technical direction across Hardware, Firmware, Backend, and Product.
Willingness and ability to work onsite five days per week.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Go or other higher-level programming languages.
Experience with Linux kernel fundamentals and device drivers.
Experience with storage fundamentals, including NAND flash behavior, filesystem fault tolerance, SD/eMMC protocols, partition tables, write amplification, and power-loss protection.
Experience with camera or video SoCs such as Ambarella, ISP/DSP pipelines, or video encoding.
Experience building firmware update, fleet observability, or device management systems for millions of IoT devices.
Experience with cloud infrastructure and backend systems.
Experience with hard drives and RAID (such as mdadm or ZFS), SMART monitoring, or building NAS/NVR products.

Responsibilities

Lead, grow, recruit, and retain a team of storage, firmware, and systems engineers.
Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, career development, and execution management.
Set the technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap for camera storage and firmware platform, balancing fleet-wide investments with support for new camera launches.
Establish engineering practices for testing, observability, incident response, root-cause analysis, and long-term maintainability.
Own the on-camera storage stack, including filesystems, video layout and indexing, SD/eMMC drivers, and raw NAND.
Lead next-generation storage architecture, including new SD card modes, partition-level encryption, and secure deletion of expired footage.
Improve footage integrity and storage reliability during power loss, filesystem corruption, and media failures; reduce write amplification and extend retention.
Develop storage observability for SD and NAND health, erase counts, bad blocks, UBI counters, writes per hour, and retention metrics.
Build hardware-in-the-loop tests for storage failure and recovery scenarios, retention, OTA transitions, partition reformats, EEPROM recovery, and SD controller firmware updates.
Partner with Hardware teams and external flash vendors to evaluate, qualify, and validate storage media.
Guide storage-adjacent backend systems for retention, cloud backup, archives, and storage health notifications; develop on-premises storage appliances with RAID-backed hard drives and SMART-based health monitoring.
Optimize boot and shutdown paths across the boot stack, kernel, userspace services, and backend connection.
Optimize memory, power, and network usage on resource-constrained embedded devices, including firmware footprint, brownout prevention, and resilient network communication.
Orchestrate device-level transitions, including system and service restarts, OTA, DSP pipeline restarts, commissioning, and decommissioning.
Improve observability and debuggability through core dumps, stack traces, reliable IPC delivery, power-on self-tests, standardized metrics, and system-wide log levels.
Improve developer and release velocity through build and kernel tooling, remote serial and flashing access, AI-assisted code review and workflows, and standardized manufacturing release and flashing automation.
Own fleet-wide reliability metrics for retention, storage health, crash rates, memory pressure, boot time, and power; use them in release go/no-go decisions.
Use fleet diagnostic data to find and resolve problems before customers notice them.
Collaborate across Hardware, Firmware, Backend, Product, and other teams to align on shared platform investments.

Benefits

Healthcare programs, with employee premiums 100% covered under at least one plan and 80% of family premiums covered under all plans.
Nationwide medical, vision, and dental coverage.
Starting January 2027, a match on a portion of eligible employee 401(k) contributions, vesting on the two-year anniversary.
Health Savings Account (HSA) with annual employer contributions and Flexible Spending Account (FSA).
Expanded mental health support.
Paid parental leave and fertility benefits.
Paid holidays, firmwide extended holidays, flexible PTO, and personal sick time.
Professional development stipend.
Wellness and fitness benefits.
Healthy lunches provided daily.
Commuter benefits.