Embedded Systems Engineer at energy startup Bare Metal​/RTOS

Mesodyne is a startup company revolutionizing power generation with its innovative Light Cell technology--using thermophotovoltaics to provide efficient, silent, reliable, long-endurance power from any fuel. By bridging the gap between batteries and internal combustion engines, Mesodyne's Light Cell technology provides more than a 10x improvement in endurance for unmanned vehicles, wearables, and various other equipment. At Mesodyne, we are committed to bringing groundbreaking products to the industrial and defense sectors, with multiple existing contracts and numerous upcoming business opportunities.

This role is for an experienced Embedded Engineer who lives at the intersection of hardware and software. You will own the firmware architecture for our power generation systems. You will be writing code that controls fuel pumps, manages combustion, and regulates high-temperature thermal loops. You won’t just be pushing commits; you will be in the lab with a debugger on one screen and an oscilloscope on the other, validating that your drivers are robust and your control loops are stable.

We are moving from prototype to product. We need an engineer who understands that in a hardware product, "99% works" means "broken." If you are driven by the challenge of architecting fail-safe systems and building complex hardware and software systems, we want to talk to you.

• Own the firmware architecture: Architect and implement robust, thread-safe firmware using C/C++ and FreeRTOS. You will define task priorities, manage inter-process communication (queues, semaphores, mutexes), and prevent race conditions.
• Critical logic & functional safety: You are responsible for the code that controls the hardware. You will design and implement fail-safe state machines for the combustion systems, thermal management systems, and battery management systems -- ensuring the system handles sensor failures or disconnects safely and predictably every time.
• Bare-metal driver development: Write, optimize, and maintain low-level drivers for sensors, valves, and peripherals. You work directly with registers, not just high-level libraries.
• Digital control implementation: Translate control laws into efficient C code. You will implement PID loops and state estimators, ensuring they run within real-time constraints without blocking safety checks.
• Hardware bring-up & debugging: Serve as the primary debugger at the hardware-software boundary. You will troubleshoot custom PCBs using oscilloscopes and logic analyzers to validate signal integrity and margin.
• Test automation: Develop Python scripts to automate hardware validation, ensuring that edge cases and failure modes are tested before deployment.

• Professional experience: 4+ years of professional experience developing embedded software for hardware products that have shipped to customers.
• C/C++ mastery: Expert-level proficiency in C/C++. You must possess a deep understanding of pointers, memory management, interrupts, etc.
• Defensive programming mindset: You write code assuming the hardware will fail. Experience designing fault-tolerant systems for hazardous environments (automotive, medical, or combustion) is highly valued.
• RTOS expertise: Proven experience setting up FreeRTOS (or equivalent) from scratch. You can explain how you have solved deadlocks and stack overflows issues.
• Hardware fluency: You are not just a coder; you are an engineer. You must be able to read electrical schematics, understand datasheet timing diagrams, and comfortably use lab equipment (scopes, analyzers) to debug systems.

This position is based at our facility in Somerville, MA.