Embedded Firmware Engineer (AUV)

Location: Bristol, RI, United States; United States citizenship or permanent residency required, with the ability to gain a security clearance.

Company

An innovative startup designing and manufacturing autonomous underwater vehicles for underwater security, exploration, research, and operations.

What you will do

• Design, build, and maintain reliable C and C++ firmware for embedded microcontrollers using bare-metal and RTOS environments.
• Bring up new hardware, including bootloaders, device drivers, and board support packages.
• Implement and debug UART, SPI, I2C, CAN, and Ethernet communication between subsystems.
• Integrate sensors, actuators, and peripherals while developing real-time control and telemetry paths.
• Optimize firmware for performance, memory usage, power consumption, and timing constraints.
• Collaborate across electrical, mechanical, and autonomy engineering; write tests, support hardware-in-the-loop testing, and perform vehicle and field debugging.

Requirements

• Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related technical field.
• 3–5 years of professional embedded software or firmware development experience.
• Strong C and C++ skills for embedded microcontrollers and hands-on STM32 experience, including STM32CubeMX/HAL, LL drivers, or register-level programming.
• Experience reading schematics and datasheets and debugging with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and JTAG/SWD.
• Knowledge of embedded communication protocols, interrupts, DMA, real-time constraints, and low-level memory management.
• Must be a United States citizen or permanent resident and able to gain a security clearance.

Nice to have

• Experience with cross-compilation, CMake, Make, embedded toolchains, or Rust.
• Familiarity with Nix/NixOS, reproducible builds, CI/CD, and automated hardware testing.
• Experience with digital signal processing, Protobufs, DDS, ROS 2, or modern robotics frameworks.
• Background in maritime sensors, underwater acoustics, subsea systems, functional safety, or safety-critical software.

Culture & Benefits

• Work at the intersection of hardware and software on autonomous underwater vehicles.
• Collaborate with electrical, mechanical, and autonomy engineers.
• Participate in code reviews and help improve engineering practices.
• Contribute to systems operating in demanding maritime conditions.