Principal Embedded Software Engineer (Rust)

Location: Based in Portland, Oregon, United States. Relocation assistance is available for moving to Portland.

Salary: $210,000–$290,000 per year, plus equity.

Company

hirify.global is a public benefit corporation developing renewable energy and ocean technologies that capture low-cost energy for computing and renewable fuels.

What you will do

• Own the embedded software stack for in-house ocean energy products and set technical direction for architecture, implementation, reliability, and maintainability.
• Work with electrical engineers from schematic capture through board bring-up, including pin assignments, peripheral selection, power budgets, and timing budgets.
• Debug hardware and software failures using schematics, datasheets, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and JTAG/SWD.
• Develop software that operates unattended for years in harsh marine environments, including fault tolerance and safe recovery.
• Define OTA and fleet update strategies for a distributed device fleet.
• Set embedded testing and CI/CD standards, review code and designs, mentor engineers, and communicate tradeoffs across engineering, operations, mechanical, and leadership teams.

Requirements

• 10+ years of production software development experience, primarily in embedded systems.
• Deep experience with Rust or C/C++; experience with Rust and no_std firmware is strongly valued.
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining embedded Linux distributions with Yocto or Buildroot.
• Experience owning the architecture and implementation of a hardware product software stack from bring-up through field deployment.
• Fluency with SPI, I²C, UART, CAN, and Ethernet, plus signal-level debugging.
• Experience with resource-constrained, real-time, power-constrained systems, OTA mechanisms, automated testing, CI/CD, version control, and code coverage.

Nice to have

• 5+ years of experience with mission-critical or safety-critical systems.
• Marine, offshore, or other harsh-environment hardware experience.
• Embedded security experience, including secure boot, encrypted communications, and key management.
• Experience building embedded systems from scratch at an early-stage hardware company.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a small, multidisciplinary team with the opportunity to shape and mentor its growth.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Company-paid gold-level PPO health insurance for full-time employees, partners, and dependents.
• Company-paid dental, vision, and disability insurance.
• Access to 401(k), health FSA, and dependent care FSA accounts.
• Equity participation in the company.