Principal Firmware Engineer/ Team Lead

Catapult Sports•Boston, MA

2h•Hybrid

About The Position

Catapult is seeking a Principal Embedded Systems Engineer to lead the platform for their camera-based products. This role involves owning the entire on-device system, from the Linux user-space stack to the C++ peripherals layer and the OTA system. The position is based in Boston and offers a hybrid work model. The engineer will lead and player-coach a small team, reporting to a Senior Director of Engineering, and will be the technical owner of the on-device system supporting movement tracking functionality. This role requires a broad skill set, including making architectural decisions, tuning motor control loops, reviewing hardware designs, and enhancing the OTA system. The ideal candidate has end-to-end ownership experience of embedded products, including software architecture, hardware bring-up, and shipping at scale.

Requirements

8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time spent on embedded Linux systems or otherwise close to hardware.
Strong proficiency in C/C++ and Python – you're comfortable across the stack from real-time C++ peripherals code to Python application services.
Demonstrated experience shipping and operating embedded products at scale: OTA, fleet observability, manufacturing provisioning, and the operational realities of devices you can't easily reach.
The ability to own ambiguous problems end-to-end: scoping, prototyping, shipping, and measuring – across software, hardware, and the seams between them.
Comfort with leadership: you've mentored engineers, led technical direction, or driven cross-team initiatives, even if your title didn't say "lead."
Baseline hardware fluency – reading a schematic, debugging with a scope or logic analyzer, and collaborating with EEs.

Nice To Haves

Experience with motor control, sensor fusion, or other robotics-adjacent problems (Kalman filtering, control loops, IMU integration).
Experience with edge AI accelerators, depth cameras, or video pipelines on embedded hardware.
Microcontroller firmware experience — not required for our current platform, but useful for future work.
Experience with containerized deployment on ARM, systemd, udev, device tree, or kernel modules.

Responsibilities

Own the technical direction of our on-device platform: the Linux application stack, the C++ peripherals layer (camera driver, IMU estimation, motor control, I2C/SPI/GPIO peripherals), OTA, and the deployment to the device fleet.
Lead and mentor a small team, setting priorities, reviewing designs, and driving execution while remaining deeply hands-on in the codebase.
Make and defend architectural decisions across a multi-language system (Python, C++, containerized services on ARM Linux).
Stretch into adjacent domains as the work demands – motor control, sensor filtering, hardware debugging, board bring-up support, manufacturing/assembly-line QA tooling.
Partner with electrical engineers on hardware design changes and new product introductions: reading schematics, debugging boards with DMM/scope/logic analyzer, and feeding hardware learnings back into firmware and software.