Firmware

The Bot Company • San Francisco, CA

3d • $200,000 - $350,000

About The Position

The Firmware Engineer will architect and build the embedded systems powering sensing, actuation, communication, and safety functions in the company’s robots. The role defines scalable firmware and system architectures and owns products from initial board bring-up through system integration, validation, manufacturing ramp, and large-scale production. The engineer develops real-time firmware for robotic subsystems, integrates sensors and feedback devices, and collaborates across engineering and manufacturing teams to investigate failures and improve reliability.

Requirements

• Strong embedded programming skills in C, C++, or Rust.
• Experience developing firmware for microcontrollers in bare-metal or RTOS environments.
• Strong understanding of interrupts, timing, concurrency, memory constraints, and real-time behavior.
• Experience bringing up custom hardware and debugging across firmware, electronics, and physical systems.
• Ability to read schematics, PCB layouts, and component datasheets.
• Familiarity with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, debuggers, and data-logging tools.
• Experience supporting physical products through validation, manufacturing ramp, or volume production.
• Strong ownership and ability to collaborate across engineering, manufacturing, and supplier teams.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on NPI experience taking embedded products through EVT, DVT, and PVT into mass production.
• Experience working directly with contract manufacturers, joint development manufacturers, or original design manufacturers.
• Experience developing factory programming, calibration, functional-test, and end-of-line test systems.
• Motor-control experience, including FOC, actuators, closed-loop control, or power electronics.
• Experience integrating production camera pipelines, including MIPI CSI-2, GMSL, ISP configuration and tuning, camera synchronization, and hardware-accelerated video encoding or compression.
• Experience with bootloaders, secure provisioning, firmware updates, production release management, or HIL testing.

Responsibilities

• Develop real-time firmware for robotic actuators, sensors, communications, and power systems.
• Own firmware from custom board bring-up through validation, production ramp, and sustained manufacturing.
• Build drivers and interfaces for ADCs, timers, PWM, DMA, SPI, I²C, UART, CAN, and other peripherals.
• Integrate encoders, force sensors, IMUs, current sensors, cameras, and other feedback devices.
• Collaborate with electrical, mechanical, controls, ML, test, and manufacturing engineers.
• Investigate hardware and firmware failures, manufacturing yield issues, and field reliability problems.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Education Level: No Education Listed