Senior Firmware Engineer, Ground Software

Description

The company is a defense technology firm working to rebuild the US drone industrial base. It designs and manufactures high-performance unmanned systems, which are tested in combat, iterated quickly, and produced at large scale.

Drones are changing how wars are fought, and the company builds the systems the West needs to stay competitive on the modern battlefield and deter adversaries of democracy. The team wants people who move quickly, take full ownership, and get capability to warfighters in months rather than years.

You will join the Ground Software team, which builds the firmware for the ground control hardware that operators carry in the field to fly aircraft and view their camera feed. The work spans microcontroller and embedded Linux targets, and it goes from the bench to the field.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain firmware for ground control hardware on microcontroller and embedded Linux targets.
• Own operator input handling, the link to the aircraft, and the ground side of telemetry and video reception.
• Own latency and reliability along the operator's control path, from input through transmission.
• Define the ground side of the aircraft-to-ground interface with the flight software team, including how the system behaves when the link degrades.
• Bring up and debug new ground hardware with the electrical engineering team.
• Write unit and integration tests, and work with the test organization on hardware-in-the-loop and field testing.

Requirements

• Strong skill in embedded C, C++, or Rust for resource-constrained systems, with firmware shipped to real hardware in the field.
• Real-time firmware experience with interrupts, DMA, timing budgets, and bugs that appear only under load.
• Hands-on board bring-up and hardware debugging with oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, including failures that do not reproduce in a debugger.
• Working knowledge of UART, SPI, I2C, USB, and Ethernet.
• A record of taking firmware from first boot to production with light direction.
• Testing habits suited to firmware that people rely on in the field.
• Experience building services and device interfaces on embedded Linux, with Yocto or Buildroot exposure.
• Linux networking and integration of IP-based radio or datalink systems.
• Experience with video pipelines on embedded hardware, covering capture, decode, display, and latency.
• Experience with RC radio or ground controller firmware, such as ExpressLRS, EdgeTX, OpenTX, or similar.
• Experience moving a product from a microcontroller to an embedded Linux platform.
• You fly FPV, RC, or drones in general.

Conditions

The US base salary range for this role is $180,000 to $252,000 USD.

The range is an estimate based on many compensation factors, and the actual salary may differ based on experience, education or training, critical skills, and business needs. It covers base salary only.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, or disability status.

External titles can include level indicators such as II or I, but internal titles use the base title only, such as Engineer or Senior Engineer.

Benefits

• Highly competitive equity grants are part of the total compensation package.