Firmware Emulation Engineer (Rtos​/Embedded) Applied AI RE Rtos​/Embedded QEMU STYX Washington, D

Firmware Emulation Engineer (RTOS/Embedded)

Zealot is deploying AI systems at the center of western cyber operations , backed by tier-1 US VCs and industry leaders. Our team includes alumni of Anthropic, xAI, and Anduril. Soon live with close U.S. allies abroad.

APPLIED AI RE RTOS/EMBEDDED QEMU STYX

Compensation 100K-195K + skin in the game equity

Location Washington, DC On Site

Stage Early-stage startup backed by tier 1 investors. Small, growing team with exceptionally high ownership.

• + Build the agentic systems that let Zealot automatically understand and emulate non-Linux embedded targets, the weird stuff nobody else touches.
• + Reverse and rehost firmware from niche, obscure, and unconventional devices: printers, industrial controllers, point-of-sale terminals, calculators, Russian DSPs, smart appliances, and anything else with a chip and a pulse.
• + Design workflows that can map boot logic, runtime dependencies, and peripheral stubs for proprietary RTOS and bare-metal environments with little or no documentation.
• + Turn the manual art of cracking open strange devices into scalable, AI-driven capability.
• + Hands-on reverse engineering experience with non-Linux embedded firmware, VxWorks, ThreadX, FreeRTOS, Nucleus, eCos, QNX, or proprietary/bare-metal environments.
• + You've popped open devices most people would never think to look at, and you enjoyed it.
• + Strong understanding of embedded boot flows, memory layouts, and peripheral interfaces across diverse architectures.
• + Strong C/C++ or Rust skills for low-level systems work.
• + Ability to work from zero documentation and rapidly build understanding from raw firmware dumps and runtime behavior.

• + Experience with QEMU, Unicorn, or custom emulation harnesses for non-Linux targets.
• + Proficiency with tools such as Ghidra, IDA, Binwalk, GDB, and JTAG/SWD debuggers.
• + Experience patching firmware and building shims to stub out missing hardware dependencies.
• + Familiarity with ARM, MIPS, AArch
  64, PowerPC, Xtensa, RISC-V, or other embedded architectures.
• + Experience with niche device ecosystems, printers (HP, Lexmark, Brother), POS systems, Russian DSPs, building automation, medical devices, or similar.
• + Experience building with LLMs and AI agents.
• + The kind of person who buys random hardware at a thrift store just to take it apart.
• + Genuinely excited about the weird corners of embedded, the stranger the device, the more interested you are.
• + Clearly interested in stepping away from purely manual research and moving toward the development of AI systems.
• + Building something massive matters more to you than comfort, titles, or predictability.
• + You want to be early at a company that will change an industry, and you're ready to do what that actually takes.

Note to recruiting firms:
We want the person who lights up when they encounter a device running a proprietary RTOS nobody has documented. Strong RE fundamentals are the baseline, what sets candidates apart is breadth across weird, non-standard embedded targets and genuine curiosity about niche hardware.

Ready?