Principal Firmware Architect

Heron Power•Scotts Valley, CA

1d•$170,000 - $260,000

About The Position

Heron Power is a startup building cutting-edge power electronics for the 21st-century grid. We aim to debottleneck the growth of electricity generation and consumption with scalable, innovative, and cost-effective hardware solutions, accelerating the electrification of everything. Our first goal is to build better converters (inverters & rectifiers) to connect large-scale renewables, storage, and loads to the grid. Heron’s leadership team is made up of seasoned veterans who have designed and shipped gigawatts of power conversion products. We believe no one person knows everything. We learn together, build together, and solve hard problems from first principles. You’ll work in a fast-moving, deeply technical environment where ownership and impact are real. Job Overview As a Principal Embedded Software Engineer / Firmware Architect, you will own the technical vision and architecture for Heron’s embedded firmware platform. You will define how our converters are operated and monitored at the device level — from microcontroller selection and RTOS architecture to resource management, safety infrastructure, and production firmware processes. This role blends deep hands-on engineering with system architecture and technical leadership. Why This Role Is Different This role owns the device brain. You’ll architect the firmware platform that every Heron product is built on — shaping performance, reliability, maintainability and scaleability at the foundation — while partnering closely with controls and cloud engineers to deliver a complete solution. If you enjoy building robust embedded systems from the metal up and setting technical direction for an entire product line, you’ll thrive here.

Requirements

8+ years of embedded firmware development with multiple shipped products
Expert-level embedded C/C++
Deep experience with RTOS, bootloaders, and low-level hardware drivers
Proven experience architecting large embedded systems (not just implementing features)
Experience building firmware CI/CD and automated testing frameworks
Strong hardware debugging skills (oscilloscope, logic analyzer, etc.)
Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship

Nice To Haves

Real-time control systems or power electronics experience
Safety-critical or high-reliability firmware (IEC 61508, UL1998, etc.)
Secure boot and device security experience
Experience integrating embedded systems with cloud/IoT platforms
FPGA or ASIC familiarity
Production manufacturing and field support experience

Responsibilities

Define and own the long-term architecture for embedded firmware across Heron products
Establish reusable platform software, hardware abstraction layers, and shared infrastructure
Set coding standards, architectural ethos, and development practices, while leading design reviews and mentoring embedded engineers
Drive system-level technical decisions across firmware and hardware boundaries
Architect and implement RTOS-based firmware for high-performance power conversion
Design low-latency control infrastructure, fault management, telemetry, real-time scheduling, and key drivers and peripherals (PWM, ADC, communications, etc.)
Evaluate and select microcontrollers/SoCs for new platforms
Build safety-critical and high-reliability firmware systems
Design bootloaders, secure firmware architecture, and update mechanisms
Implement logging, diagnostics, tracing, and observability tools on-device
Define device-side communication interfaces and data models
Partner with the connected systems team members to enable telemetry, OTA, and fleet management
Support manufacturing test, provisioning, and production workflows
Architect build system, CI/CD, and automated testing infrastructure for firmware
Define unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop testing strategies
Improve developer tooling and validation pipelines