Principal Firmware Engineer

A well-funded consumer hardware company is hiring a Lead Firmware Engineer to architect and own the entire firmware stack for a first-of-its-kind consumer wearable. This is a foundational hire. You will define the architecture, stand up the infrastructure from scratch, and build the firmware team around you. You will report directly to the Head of Hardware in a flat, builder-first organization where leaders stay hands-on.

You are a senior technical leader who has shipped at least one consumer electronics product under your leadership and can reason at the system level across multiple compute domains. You are comfortable walking into an empty room and knowing exactly what to do next.

• Architect firmware across a distributed, multi-MCU platform spanning always-on sensing, connectivity, and compute domains, owning the critical calls on RTOS choice, task structure, inter-processor protocols, and power optimization.
• Stay hands-on where it counts: board bring-up, debugging, and unblocking the team on first-of-its-kind problems where no playbook exists.
• Identify organizational needs, hire and build out the firmware team, and manage external JDM and design-house partners while owning end-to-end accountability for firmware delivery.
• Drive SoC evaluation and tech-stack decisions across the full compute range, from bare-metal sensor hubs to complex multi-core SoCs with CPU, NPU, DSP, and ISP subsystems.
• Establish production-grade engineering practices: build and release pipelines, device health telemetry, OTA with safe rollback, and field debug tooling.

• 10+ years of embedded firmware engineering experience for consumer electronics.
• Proven ownership of a firmware stack on ARM Cortex-M with Zephyr and/or other RTOS environments.
• At least one consumer electronics product shipped to production under your technical leadership.
• Strong system-level thinking across sensing, connectivity, and compute, including wireless (BLE, Wi‑Fi) and low‑power design.
• Hands‑on depth in bring‑up and debugging (JTAG/SWD, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes) paired with the architectural judgment to lead.
• Experience building and scaling a firmware team and collaborating with external hardware partners.

Zephyr RTOS, FreeRTOS, Embedded C/C++, ARM Cortex-M, BLE, Wi‑Fi, DSP, JTAG/SWD, OTA updates, multi-core SoCs (Qualcomm‑class), ESP-IDF, ThreadX, NuttX, Linux BSP, on-device AI/ML inference, camera ISP, audio DSP.

• Founding ownership of an entire firmware stack for a genuinely new product category.
• Flat, mission‑driven team backed by top‑tier investors, moving fast toward a near‑term first product.
• Top‑of‑market compensation structured so you can focus entirely on the work.
• Direct line to the Head of Hardware and a leadership team that has shipped consumer hardware at scale.