Senior QA Engineer, Firmware and Hardware in the Loop
About The Position
Somewear's software platform and satellite-powered hardware enable commercial and government teams to maintain situational awareness during high-pressure operations, in any environment. Somewear serves a wide range of customers including helicopter paramedics, backcountry explorers, firefighters, and operators within the US Department of Defense. Our purpose is to build best-in-class solutions that keep people in touch, informed, and safe anywhere in the world. We're looking for a Senior QA Engineer to own quality for the firmware that runs on our satellite hardware. Today our firmware and hardware teams have almost no dedicated QA support, which means our embedded engineers spend weeks running manual regression cycles instead of building. You will change that. You will stand up the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test rigs, automate the regression suites that currently eat engineering time, and become the person the firmware team relies on to know whether a build is ready to ship. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with unusually broad ownership. You will be the first dedicated QA engineer on the hardware side, so you get to define how firmware quality works here rather than inherit someone else's process.
Requirements
- 5+ years in QA or test engineering, with substantial time spent testing embedded firmware on physical hardware
- Direct hardware-in-the-loop experience. This is the single most important qualification for this role
- Proficiency scripting test automation and log analysis, ideally in Python
- Fluency on the command line and with embedded debug tooling such as JTAG or SWD probes and ADB
- Track record of building automated test coverage from scratch, not only executing existing test plans
- Demonstrated ownership of a test strategy end to end, defined by you rather than handed to you
- Ability to reason independently about risk, coverage, and when a build is good enough to ship, and to hold that position under shipping pressure
- Clear written communication with engineers, product, and leadership
- Comfort working with AI coding assistants as part of your daily workflow
Nice To Haves
- HIL experience on unmanned systems: iron birds, flight simulation, or vehicle-in-the-loop setups
- Background at a drone, robotics, or autonomous vehicle company
- Experience with satellite communications, LoRa or mesh networking, or low-power IoT devices
- Experience with mission-critical or regulated software and hardware development
- Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and how hardware test stages fit into them
- Background in defense or emergency response
- Experience working with government customers
- Knowledge of ATAK or similar tactical systems
Responsibilities
- Own firmware QA end to end, covering both manual regression and automation
- Design, build, and maintain hardware-in-the-loop test rigs that exercise real devices against real firmware
- Replace manual regression cycles with automated test suites, freeing embedded engineers to stay on development
- Write scripts, primarily in Python, that drive test execution and capture logs from multiple sources
- Correlate logs across debug probes and device interfaces, including SEGGER J-Link and ADB, to isolate root cause on failures that span firmware, radio, and app layers
- Partner directly with the firmware and electrical engineering teams on testability, instrumentation, and release criteria
- Define and own the release validation gate for firmware builds
- Expand coverage over time into our Unmanned (Horizon) product line as that program matures
- Build the tooling and process that let firmware QA scale past one person, and help scope and onboard the next QA hire on hardware
Benefits
- A competitive and equitable compensation plan. This is a full-time, salaried position that includes equity.
- Physical well-being including health, dental and vision benefits.
- Focus Days: No meetings every Monday to allow you to focus and operate at your best
- Unlimited PTO
- Flexible parental leave
- Ownership of a quality function that does not exist yet, on hardware that people depend on in emergencies
- Work with an ambitious team solving complex technical challenges
- Direct access to senior leadership and significant impact on company growth
- Opportunity to develop solutions that save lives
- An authentic investment in you as a human being and your career as a professional
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
