Embedded Software Engineer, Microcontrollers

Description

The company builds America's next-generation power system. It deploys a large network of distributed batteries to turn today's fragile, centralized grid into a more resilient and abundant one. The team is made up of engineers, operators and creative problem solvers working on complex, interdisciplinary problems.

The Embedded MCU team owns the firmware closest to the hardware, meaning the code on the microcontrollers inside the company's batteries, inverters and disconnect systems. The team brings up every new board, writes the control and protection logic, and defines the interfaces between the hardware and the rest of the software. It works side by side with hardware and power electronics engineers, in the lab and at the bench.

The company is a startup, so priorities change quickly and the role may grow or shift as business needs change. The responsibilities below are not a complete list.

Responsibilities

• Own the business logic on the microcontrollers: state machines, control and sequencing, fault handling, and safety coordination for batteries, inverters and disconnect systems.
• Lead bring-up of new boards from end to end, covering peripheral configuration, driver development and BSP/HAL integration, and shorten the time it takes to get each board running.
• Implement and tune deterministic real-time control and protection on multi-core MCUs, dividing work across cores while meeting strict ISR timing and jitter limits.
• Build and maintain the device communications stack, including CAN and CAN-FD drivers, buffering and transport reliability, plus higher-level protocols and the firmware update flows that run over them.
• Act as the main software contact for Hardware Engineering: join schematic reviews, help choose processors, peripherals, pin assignments and timing, and debug hardware and software integration issues on the bench.
• Create reusable firmware libraries and coding standards to replace product-specific code, so each new product ships faster than the one before.
• Take products from prototype to production firmware and into the field, using hardware-in-the-loop testing and crash dumps to reduce firmware issues reported from the field.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience shipping bare-metal or RTOS firmware on modern microcontrollers such as ARM Cortex-M, including taking at least one product to manufacturing.
• Deep C and C++ skills: clean, modular, defensive code, with a solid understanding of memory management, ISR-safe patterns, and compiler and runtime behavior.
• Ability to read schematics and datasheets and to work directly with hardware and power electronics engineers on design and processor selection tradeoffs.
• Strong sense of firmware architecture: clear separation of responsibilities, minimal shared state, built-in observability, and designs that roll out safely and fail predictably.
• A first-principles approach, a record of finding simple solutions to hard embedded problems, and root-cause debugging skills that reach down to the hardware.
• Nice to have: experience designing deterministic real-time control and protection on multi-core MCUs, with robust fault handling and safe recovery.
• Nice to have: experience with CAN and CAN-FD and higher-level protocols such as ISO-TP and UDS, including firmware updates over CAN.
• Nice to have: familiarity with power electronics, grid-tied inverters or battery management. Strong engineers who lack this are expected to ramp up quickly.

Conditions

The role is in person at the office.

Hours are not a standard 9-to-5, and the team is fully committed to the work.

Responsibilities may expand or change as the company's needs change.