Firmware Engineer

WindBorne Systems•Palo Alto, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

WindBorne Systems is supercharging weather models with a unique proprietary data source: a global constellation of next-generation smart weather balloons targeting the most critical atmospheric data. They design, manufacture, and operate their own balloons, using the data they collect to generate otherwise unattainable weather intelligence. Their mission is to eliminate weather uncertainty and help humanity adapt to climate change, from predicting hurricanes to speeding the adoption of renewables. The company envisions a future instrumented by thousands of microballoons, closing gaps in understanding the planet and providing critical information. The founding team of Stanford engineers was named Forbes 2019 30 under 30 and is backed by top investors including Khosla Ventures. WindBorne is looking for a Firmware Engineer to own their entire firmware stack. As a vertically integrated weather company, they design, calibrate, and integrate custom sensors and control mechanisms into autonomous balloons. This role presents unique challenges, including components operating outside temperature specifications, extremely limited power, and difficulties in updating code remotely. The position emphasizes work at the intersection of hardware and software, where clever code can compensate for physical limitations. The engineer will design and run experiments to understand system behaviors in unusual conditions, glean insight from limited data, and own firmware strategy, making tactical decisions for both quick tests and robust solutions. Responsibilities range from maintaining a custom RTOS and hardware abstraction layer to developing driver interfaces for a suite of atmospheric sensors, solving fascinating challenges alongside a team of brilliant, passionate engineers.

Requirements

Experience programming, shipping, and maintaining hardware in a real-world setting.
Must be excited by rapid iteration more than trying to perfectly plan ahead of time
Fluent in C/C++ and Python. Though ideally you ever so slightly look down on software engineers who only write interpreted languages, but you wouldn’t admit this because you are too nice.
Should have experience writing low-level drivers for a number of various chips.
Should be comfortable reading PCB schematics and doing some EE design work
Be able to form hypothesis and run experiments about the behaviour of the system
Must be an effective communicator, able to cut through misunderstandings to the core of an issue and reason about tradeoffs in complex multidisciplinary spaces
Excellent debugging skills in complex settings

Nice To Haves

Experience with FPGAs and HDL
Knowledge of RF systems and wireless protocols
Degree in Computer Science/Electrical Engineering or related field
Stellar understanding of undergrad level physics

Responsibilities

Develop and maintain drivers & low level libraries for new chips, modules, & sensors
Own our custom open source RTOS hardware abstraction layer, Amslah. It has many custom features made for our unique application (I’m excited to tell you about them!) but but requires hardening and architecture refinements as we scale
Push the limits of our custom sensor hardware & calibration infrastructure, ensuring our GSBs are power optimized & survive extreme cold beyond subcomponent specifications.
Work closely with people doing R&D on novel hardware as we seek to improve the accuracy of our meteorological measurements.
Design fault-tolerant systems that can recover gracefully from unexpected conditions
Debug highly non-trivial issues across hardware and software