Firmware Engineer (Embedded Systems)

Location: China; on-site

Salary: CN¥80K–CN¥100K plus equity

Company

hirify.global is a Y Combinator-backed research lab building custom hardware and learned models of human embodied intelligence for robotics and world modeling.

What you will do

• Own the embedded software stack for wearable human-motion capture hardware on embedded Linux and ARM.
• Design firmware state machines for boot, capture, idle, and fault recovery, including power-management transitions.
• Develop drivers and synchronization infrastructure for cameras, IMUs, microphones, and environmental sensors.
• Build concurrent data-capture pipelines, hardware video encoding, high-throughput storage, and delivery-format packing.
• Implement device telemetry, secure OTA updates with signed images and rollback protection, remote configuration, and fleet-management commands.
• Perform board bring-up and diagnose hardware-interface, timing, power-sequencing, and communication faults with electrical engineers.

Requirements

• Strong C/C++ experience developing embedded systems on ARM.
• Python experience for testing, tooling, and automation.
• Camera-driver experience with V4L2 or an equivalent framework.
• Deep familiarity with MIPI CSI-2, I²C, SPI, USB, interrupts, schematics, and datasheets.
• Experience with interrupts, race conditions, memory constraints, real-time scheduling, RTOS concepts, and multithreaded embedded environments.
• Willingness to perform deep systems work and spend long hours in the lab during board bring-up.

Nice to have

• Qualcomm, NXP, or Ambarella BSP experience.
• SerDes driver integration and hardware H.264/H.265 encoder pipelines.
• PTP/IEEE 1588 timing, high-bandwidth data acquisition, sensor fusion, or Kalman-filter implementation.
• OTA infrastructure, IoT telemetry stacks such as MQTT or AWS IoT, Azure IoT Hub, ROS, MCAP, or Foxglove.

Culture & Benefits

• Lean, deeply technical research environment backed by Y Combinator.
• Meaningful ownership from the first day and direct impact on model capabilities.
• Work on firmware deployed unattended on real users for full shifts.
• Equity is offered in addition to compensation.