Senior Firmware Engineer

Albedo•Broomfield, CO

16h•Onsite

About The Position

Albedo is making Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) mainstream, building the infrastructure to usher every satellite mission set into this new orbital domain. We build buses, integrated satellites, and turnkey missions for customers to thrive in VLEO, between 250 km - 400 km, where proximity compounds performance and drag self-cleans debris. As part of the first 100 employees at Albedo, you will have a big impact on Albedo’s trajectory to proliferating VLEO — whether you’re advancing hardware to increase satellite longevity, scaling production for large constellations, building next-gen flight and ground software to push performance, or enabling missions that matter for national security and our day-to-day life here on earth. Albedo takes a first-principles approach — in space and in business. We move with speed, take calculated risks, and learn quickly. We use AI regularly to create leverage in every discipline across the company. We work in-person at our Broomfield CO HQ to maximize team and company productivity. We work hard and with urgency to compound our first-mover advantage. We're looking for builders who want to own outcomes, not tasks. Systems thinkers who balance precision with iteration while thinking about the big picture. Individuals who are energized by creating a category rather than competing in an existing one. You’ll join a team that has already proven what others said wasn’t feasible and is now scaling and upgrading our VLEO buses & payloads to serve mission sets across sensing, communications, and responsive operations.

Requirements

5–10 years of firmware engineering experience in embedded or real-time systems.
Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field.
Strong C and C++ skills for memory-constrained and performance-sensitive systems.
Bare-metal firmware experience on microcontrollers.
Experience with registers, boot flows, interrupts, peripheral drivers, and low-level debugging.
Experience with mainstream MCU families.
Comfortable reading schematics and reasoning about signal paths, power rails, timing, and interface behavior.
Hands-on bench experience with oscilloscopes, multimeters, logic analyzers, and debug probes.
Experience working with FPGA/gateware teams or register-level memory maps.
Experience defining and debugging HW↔SW or FW↔FSW interfaces.
US CITIZENSHIP IS REQUIRED

Nice To Haves

Motor control and field-oriented control for brushless or CMG-class motors.
Real-time control-loop firmware and FW↔FSW protocol design.
New-hardware bring-up and board-level debug for avionics or high-reliability systems.
Rust.
Python for test automation.
RTOS exposure.
Experience using AI tools in daily engineering work, including LLM assistants for code, review, debugging, documentation, and design. Albedo uses Claude Code extensively.

Responsibilities

Develop bare-metal firmware in C/C++ for MCU-based avionics systems.
Own MCU boot flows, startup behavior, interrupt handlers, and register-level peripheral drivers.
Bring up new hardware and debug board-level issues using schematics, datasheets, scopes, multimeters, logic analyzers, and debuggers.
Implement and validate communication protocols including UART, SPI, I²C, CAN, USB, Ethernet, and related interfaces.
Work directly with FPGA/gateware engineers to read memory maps, build drivers, and debug cross-boundary issues.
Partner with flight software and controls teams to define deterministic FW↔FSW interfaces for real-time systems.
Build test hooks, automation, and documentation that make firmware easier to validate and integrate.
Support spacecraft integration and test campaigns.