Senior Embedded Software Engineer

Icarus•El Segundo, CA

8d•$120,000 - $220,000

About The Position

Icarus was founded on the belief that the Stratosphere is the Forgotten Frontier and that reclaiming it will define the next era of aerospace and what is possible from the sky. We build solar-powered aircraft that fly at 60,000 ft for weeks at a time, delivering persistent, affordable, and scalable presence from this layer of the atmosphere. Mission Re-establish and maintain dominance in the Stratosphere. You will work side by side with the CEO and a small team of world-class builders. You will own your subsystem end to end. Design it. Build it. Break it. Fix it. Validate it in the desert. Fly it. Then do it again, faster We expect full extreme ownership. This is a high-trust, no-BS team, and everyone pulls their weight We are hiring across the stack: mechanical, aerodynamics, RF, GNC, electrical, avionics, power electronics, energy storage, software, and systems We want builders. No hand-holding. No fluff. No fake projects. No slide decks. No sitting in meetings all day. Just raw engineering, real hardware, and real flight You must thrive under pressure, learn fast, troubleshoot in the field, and push hardware to its limits. We move fast. We go to Mojave at 4 am in the morning . We expect results and an obsession with quality and speed You will be a core executor of flight systems, taking them from concept to reality and driving rapid iteration loops. You will work across design, integration, testing, and flight. If you want real ownership, real hardware, and real flight milestones, this is it. No tourists. No bystanders. Only builders.

Requirements

2+ years shipping real embedded systems (aerospace, robotics, automotive, defense, or similarly high-reliability domains)
Strong C/C++ fundamentals and comfort working close to hardware
Experience with RTOS or bare-metal firmware, interrupts, timing, and deterministic systems
Experience with common embedded interfaces and protocols (SPI, I2C, UART, CAN, Ethernet)
Strong debugging skills using scopes, logic analyzers, JTAG, and real-world fault reproduction
Comfort moving fast, owning outcomes, and troubleshooting in the field

Responsibilities

Build and ship flight-critical embedded software for long-endurance stratospheric aircraft
Own embedded subsystems end to end: architecture, implementation, bring-up, debugging, test, and flight validation
Write firmware for MCU-based avionics, sensors, actuators, power systems, and comms interfaces
Integrate sensors and peripherals (IMU, GNSS, air data, magnetometer, servos, radios) and build reliable drivers and middleware
Design robust telemetry, logging, and health monitoring to support long-duration autonomous operations
Build test harnesses, HIL hooks, and automation that makes iteration loops faster
Support integration, production bring-up, and flight ops in the desert