Ocean Career: Saildrone Senior Firmware Engineer

Firmware Engineer

Saildrone works with governments, civil agencies, foundations, universities, and private companies around the globe to drive better information about our oceans and seas. As a result of our work, Saildrone has been included on Fast Company's annual list of the World's Most Innovative Companies, earned an Ocean Awards' Innovation Award, won Best Tech For Good from the Timmy Awards, and was recognized by Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism 50 list of the Top 50 Companies Kickstarting American Renewal.

Our first-annual Atlantic hurricane mission with NOAA was included as one of The New York Times' 21 Things That Happened for the First Time in 2021 and Popular Science's 100 Greatest Innovations of 2021.

We are based in Alameda, CA, with offices in Washington DC and St. Petersburg, FL, and operate our missions worldwide. Saildrone is backed by top-tier investors in the frontier tech and sustainability sectors, including Social Capital, Capricorn, Lux Capital, BOND Capital, and Emerson Collective.

This is an exciting opportunity with a fast-growing team at the cutting-edge intersection of big data services and autonomous hardware. You will be an integral part of a high-performing multi-disciplinary team delivering high impact for humanity and future generations.

We are seeking a firmware engineer to write processor support and application software for embedded devices. You will add new features to existing hardware and bring up new hardware, working closely with the hardware design engineers. Your customers will primarily be vehicle software engineers and vehicle operators. There is an existing codebase of chip support infrastructure that we are planning to deprecate, so this is a good time to join to have a lot of impact on a brand-new distributed system design.

Our embedded software is written in C and C++, and it communicates over many types of channels using a wide array of protocols. This is a fairly hands-on position; you will be expected to handle electronics and its supporting equipment as you do bring-up and integration, as well as leverage basic skills with oscilloscopes and logic analyzers.

• Receive brand-new hardware and write the firmware to bring it to life.
• Add new capabilities to and fix bugs impacting existing hardware.
• Design and develop offboard software infrastructure for deploying and testing hardware.
• Design and develop onboard software architecture and infrastructure and apply it to multiple instances of hardware.
• Support, manage, and enhance firmware on various 3rd party devices

• 5-8 years of experience in firmware
• Understanding of how to set up and debug tool chains, how to manage memory and storage in constrained environments, and bare-metal boot sequences
• Operational skill in C, C++, and Python
• Familiar with a variety of serial hardware interfaces (UART, SPI, I2C, etc.)
• Knowledge of software processes to produce sustainable and maintainable code
• Good verbal and written communication skills
• Hobbyist-level electrical engineering test equipment operational skill
• BS in engineering (or equivalent experience)

• Experience with Simulink/Mat Lab and control logic
• Experience with firmware for control of diesel engines
• Familiar with a low level RTOS such as FreeRTOS
• Familiar with CAN protocols
• Experience with device driver or kernel development
• A basic understanding of schematics and how they relate to firmware implementations

• Work is performed on a computer and requires ability to operate a keyboard and other peripheral devices. Handling of electronics and other supporting equipment.

Location:

This position is hybrid in Alameda, CA (3 days onsite minimum). Our waterfront office offers beautiful views of San Francisco Bay in always sunny Alameda. Even our walls have good karma, our offices mix software development with a hardware production line in the former airplane hangar used to film 'The Matrix'.

• Medical, dental and vision plans for you and your dependents.
• Short and relaxing ferry ride from the Ferry Building for SF residents
• Enhanced Parental Leave Programs
• Competitive benefits including excellent medical, life insurance, 401k plan

A reasonable estimate of the current range is $132,200 – $172,200 annually.