Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer

Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer

San Carlos, CA

Engineering

In office

Full-time

At Brew Bird, we believe in building a sustainable future in coffee. We're developing a technology platform to scale the $100 billion specialty coffee market, while working with top local and national roasters to bring the highest quality cup of coffee to every home and office. Brew Bird is backed by some of the world’s best venture funds. We're a passionate team of builders who use technology to craft elegant and delightful solutions to challenging real world problems.

This role sits at the intersection of AI, robotics, consumer hardware, IoT, and specialty coffee. You'll work hands-on across the stack to build machines that operate reliably in the real world while delivering an exceptional coffee experience  ideal candidate has shipped real embedded products, seen them fail in the field, debugged them under pressure, and improved the platform as a result.

If you enjoy building elegant systems, solving messy real-world problems, and working closely with a highly hands-on engineering team to bring ambitious hardware products to life, we'd love to talk.

• 5+ years of production embedded firmware experience in C or C++ on resource-constrained microcontrollers. Experience shipping at least one product that operated in the field long enough to expose real reliability issues. Deep ARM Cortex-M experience; STM
  32 or ESP
  32 experience is a strong plus.
• Comfort with linker scripts, startup code, memory layout, interrupts, fault handling, core dumps, MPU/cache configuration, and low-level debugging.
• Experience with distributed embedded systems involving multiple MCUs communicating over wired buses such as RS-485, CAN, RS-422, or similar.
• Strong understanding of bus arbitration, timeouts, retry behavior, degraded operation, and debugging failures that may originate across multiple boards.
• Low-level driver development from datasheets, including timing-sensitive peripherals such as PWM, DMA, capture/compare, quadrature decoding, SPI, I²C, UART, and ADCs.
• Closed-loop control experience with real hardware, such as PID control...etc.
• Build system experience across CMake, GNU Make, or similar tool chains.
• Strong ownership instincts, comfort with ambiguity, and a track record of driving difficult firmware problems to resolution.
• Use AI-assisted development tools, including agents such as Claude Code, as part of a disciplined hardware-verified firmware workflow.

• Multi-board hardware bring-up on a product that did not exist before, including schematic review, first power-on, sensor characterization, and EVT/DVT/PVT cycles.
• Production experience with Zephyr. For Zephyr, familiarity with Kconfig, device tree, overlays, CMake/West, and driver models.
• Firmware experience in coffee, espresso, commercial appliances, HVAC, dishwashers, 3D printers, lab automation, pumps, robotics, or other systems involving thermal, fluidic, and motion control.
• Experience with mains-AC products, including phase control, zero-cross detection, isolation requirements, and safety certifications such as UL, ETL, or IEC 60335.
• Cellular IoT or connected-device fleet experience, including OTA rollouts, remote diagnostics, and modem integration. Blues Wireless Notecard experience is a plus.
• File system or nonvolatile storage experience in firmware, such as LittleFS, FATFS, NVS, settings APIs, or calibration persistence.
• USB device stack experience.
• Embedded signal-processing experience, including filters, FFT-based detection, or sensor fusion. State-machine architecture experience, including hierarchical state machines or frameworks such as Zephyr SMF, QP/QM, Boost.
  
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