Engineering Manager – Camera Firmware Platform

Description

The company makes an AI-powered security platform for protecting people and sites, covering video, access control, air quality sensors, alarms, intercoms and visitor management. More than 30,000 customers use it, with over 2 million devices deployed in 170+ countries.

The Camera Firmware Platform team builds the base software every camera runs on. Product firmware teams add new camera categories, while this team improves reliability, speed, footprint and power use across the whole fleet, both current and future models.

The team has two parts. Edge Storage owns the storage software inside each camera, keeping customer video safe on SD cards and raw NAND through network drops and sudden power loss, across millions of cameras and petabytes of footage, plus the backend services for retention, cloud backup and storage health. Firmware Platform owns the shared system layer under every camera feature, including boot and shutdown, memory and power, system state, IPC, observability and firmware update. It is built once for every camera model and SoC.

You will lead storage and embedded engineers responsible for the reliability, performance, power and stability of firmware on more than 1.8 million always-online devices. You will set the storage and platform roadmap, choose which fleet-wide investments matter most, and turn them into measurable gains in retention, storage endurance, boot time, memory headroom, power draw and crash rates.

You will work with the Camera Firmware product team, Hardware, Streaming, Computer Vision, Cloud Infrastructure, Security, Manufacturing and Product. You will also work with the shared Linux OS layer used by all product lines, building platform features on cameras first and then sharing them across the company's products.

The role mixes hands-on technical leadership with people management. It is onsite at the headquarters in San Mateo, CA.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of storage, firmware and systems engineers, and hire and keep strong embedded engineers as the team's scope expands.
• Coach engineers through design reviews, code reviews, career growth and delivery.
• Set the multi-quarter technical vision and roadmap for camera storage and firmware, weighing fleet-wide work against support for new camera launches.
• Set engineering standards for testing, observability, incident response, root-cause analysis and long-term maintainability.
• Take full ownership of the in-camera storage stack, from filesystems (ext4, UBIFS) through video layout, indexing, SD and eMMC drivers and raw NAND. Lead next-generation designs such as new SD card modes, partition-level encryption and secure deletion of expired footage.
• Keep footage intact through power loss, filesystem corruption and failing media. Reduce write amplification with aligned, batched writes, and extend retention through index compression, better SD capacity allocation and smarter handling of high- and low-quality streams.
• Build storage observability for SD and NAND health, erase counts, bad blocks, UBI counters, writes per hour and retention metrics that inform release go/no-go decisions.
• Create hardware-in-the-loop tests for storage failure cases: full-period retention, OTA changes to storage layout, partition reformats, EEPROM recovery and SD controller firmware updates.
• Work with Hardware teams and outside flash vendors to evaluate, qualify and validate next-generation storage media.
• Guide storage-related backend systems for retention, cloud backup, archives and storage health alerts. Build on-premises appliances where cameras back up footage to RAID-backed hard drives over the LAN, with SMART-based drive health monitoring.
• Speed up boot and shutdown across the boot stack, kernel, userspace services and backend connection, to cut downtime and protect retention.
• Reduce memory, power and network use on constrained devices: shrink DRAM and flash footprint, prevent brownouts at peak load with schemes such as Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS), and make device-to-backend traffic more resilient with retry backoff with jitter and connection consolidation.
• Sequence device state changes in the right order: service and system restarts, OTA, DSP pipeline restarts, commissioning and decommissioning.
• Improve debuggability with core dumps and stack traces for crashes, reliable IPC delivery, power-on self tests, standard per-service and fleet-wide metrics, and system-wide log levels.
• Speed up development and release with build and kernel tooling, remote serial and flashing access, AI-assisted code review, and automated manufacturing release and flashing across camera models.
• Own fleet-wide reliability metrics for retention, storage health, crashes, memory pressure, boot time and power, and make them count in release decisions.
• Catch faults early, using diagnostic data from across the fleet, before customers see them.

Requirements

• A BS or MS in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering or a closely related technical field.
• 8+ years of software engineering in embedded or systems software, including 2+ years leading or managing teams that build high-performing systems, storage, platform or infrastructure software.
• Experience designing storage for continuous, high-throughput writes, such as video recording.
• Strong C/C++ systems programming skills. Experience with Go or other higher-level languages is preferred.
• Hands-on experience profiling and optimizing system performance, memory and power on resource-constrained devices.
• Experience designing concurrent userspace services and IPC mechanisms such as shared memory, sockets and message queues, and weighing their trade-offs.
• Experience debugging complex OS or storage problems in production across large deployed fleets.
• A proven record of setting technical strategy and aligning multiple teams around shared platform investments.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to shape technical direction across Hardware, Firmware, Backend and Product.
• Able and willing to work onsite five days per week.
• Bonus: experience with Linux kernel fundamentals and device drivers.
• Bonus: knowledge of storage fundamentals, including NAND flash behavior, filesystem fault tolerance, SD/eMMC protocols, partition tables, write amplification and power-loss protection.
• Bonus: experience with camera or video SoCs (e.g., Ambarella), ISP/DSP pipelines or video encoding.
• Bonus: experience building firmware update, fleet observability or device management systems for millions of IoT devices.
• Bonus: experience with cloud infrastructure and backend systems.
• Bonus: experience with hard drives and RAID (e.g., mdadm, ZFS), SMART monitoring or NAS/NVR products.

Conditions

Onsite five days per week at the San Mateo, CA headquarters.

The estimated annual pay range is $200,000 - $315,000 USD, expressed as on-target earnings for full-time staff, made up of base pay and commissions where applicable.

Starting pay depends on the primary work location, the candidate's skills and experience, market demand and internal parity.

Depending on the role, employees may also be eligible for sales incentives, discretionary bonuses and equity in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs).

The company sponsors and takes over sponsorship of employment visas for this role. If an offer is made, it will make every reasonable effort to secure a visa.

The company is an equal opportunity employer.

Benefits

• For US employees, the company supports health and wellbeing with the following. The list is not exhaustive.
• Healthcare plans with personal health and financial options. Employee premiums are 100% covered under at least one plan, and 80% of family premiums are covered under all plans.
• Nationwide medical, vision and dental coverage.
• 401(k) matching on eligible earnings starting January 2027, vesting after 2 years.
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with annual employer contributions, and a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) with tax savings.
• Expanded mental health support.
• Paid parental leave and fertility benefits.
• Paid holidays, firmwide extended holidays, flexible PTO and personal sick time.
• Professional development stipend.
• Wellness and fitness benefits.
• Healthy lunches every day.
• Commuter benefits.