Lead Edge Engineer

queueinc • Newark, CA

16h • Onsite

About The Position

We are building out the Edge squad: the engineers who write the software that runs on our machine and tells its hardware what to do. You are a hands-on technical lead. You own the edge software end to end, from design and code to release and behavior in the field, and you raise the bar for everyone who builds it. You build to one rule and hold the squad to it: when the machine cannot confirm a step, it stops safely and says why. This is a lead-level role: a staff engineer's technical bar, plus delivery through a team. It is hands-on, and it is not a people-management role.

Requirements

• Ownership — you have written production C, C++ or Rust on Linux and owned a device's software end to end, from the first design to the fault found in the field, including faults that started in another team's part of the system.
• Hardware integration over buses — CAN, RS-485 and other serial links, USB. You debug at the wire when the logs and the hardware disagree.
• Real-time orchestration and state machines — you have designed the sequencing of motion, sensing and I/O where partial failure is normal, and you design the failure path first: when a step cannot be confirmed, the system stops safely and says why.
• MCU boundary literacy — you understand how a microcontroller runs and what it exposes to a Linux host, and you have designed versioned device protocols with firmware that held up through change, for example a protobuf schema, a CAN message set or a register map.
• Embedded Linux integration — you have done substantial work getting software running well on an embedded Linux system: its services, devices, start-up, configuration and updates, worked out with the owners of its image.
• Connected device fleets — you have run devices in the field: updates, remote diagnostics, telemetry, and the recovery of a unit you cannot touch.
• Hardened device platforms — you have shipped software on devices with verified start-up, signed updates and a read-only system, and you design software that works within them.
• Technical leadership — you have made a team's engineering better through design, review and mentoring, without needing a title. You ask for challenge on your own designs, change course when the evidence says so, and say early, with data, when a commitment will slip. When several things go wrong at once, you put them in order and finish one before you start the next.
• The edge software is written in Rust, and you will work in it every day. Rust in production is strongly preferred.

Nice To Haves

• Industrial x86 and ARM platforms in a shipped product.
• Full ownership of an embedded Linux distribution: building and maintaining the image of a shipped device, from what goes into it to how it updates.
• Kernel and board bring-up: drivers, device trees and boot on a new board.
• NVIDIA Jetson: JetPack and Linux for Tegra, secure boot, field updates and the inference stack.
• Robotics, medical devices, automotive or industrial automation.

Responsibilities

• Design and code — The design of the edge software and the code that carries it, from the links to the boards to the state machines that sequence each fill. You stay in the code and review the squad's.
• Contracts at the boundaries — The contracts with the microcontrollers and the vision service. You design and version them so that old and new versions work together through a release.
• Releases and field behavior — How a release of the edge software is built, tested and shipped, what the software reports from the field, and how it is diagnosed from a distance. You work on updates with the platform and systems reliability engineers, and on the image with the engineers who own it.
• The seams — Where the edge software meets firmware, vision, the cloud and the image. A fault that falls between two squads is yours until it is fixed, and you fix it with the squad on the other side.
• The squad's bar — What you accept in review becomes the standard, so you define it crisply, hold it every time and measure quality against it. You grow the engineers around you into leaders: you pair and coach, give them the lead and back them, and you interview the ones who join.
• Decisions in writing — You write decisions down with the options you weighed and why, and share them early for challenge across the squads, so engineers can make the next decision without you.
• Fail-closed behavior — The rule on every path the squad owns: when the machine cannot confirm a step, it stops safely and says why. You design the failure path first, and the squad does too.
• What stays with others, so that you know where your work stops: the operating-system image stays with the engineers who own it, the cloud with the platform engineers, and the call that a release is ready with software leadership.

Benefits

• Ownership — the edge software end to end, from design to the field
• Hard problems: real-time sequencing across boards, the seams with firmware, vision and the cloud, and machines in the field you cannot touch
• Small team, zero bureaucracy, high trust

What This Job Offers

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