Embedded Systems Engineer (Fresh Graduate)

About the role

Humanex is a Canadian company building next generation AR glasses. The image does not come from a screen, it comes from a laser and a tiny mirror working in such precise lockstep that the timing is held to trillionths of a second.

You would work day to day with the people bringing this to life, taking on hardware bring-up, debug, and firmware development directly.

This is a Full-time Independent Contractor position.

Key Responsibilities

• Write and test firmware in C/C++ for the microcontrollers that run the glasses, starting with small, well-defined pieces and growing into larger ones
• Learn the system from the people who built it, and write down what you learn as you go, so the design and the reasoning behind it live somewhere the whole team can reach
• Bring boards to life. Power on a new board and work out why it does not yet do what it should
• Wire the system together. Get sensors, the laser driver and the mirror controller talking to each other over I2C, SPI, USB and the like, and check that the data arrives intact
• Get hands-on with FPGAs. Read and build on existing Verilog, run simulations, and learn how the logic on your screen becomes real hardware
• Live at the bench with an oscilloscope and a logic analyser, watching real signals and working out why they do not match what you expected
• Build the small test setups and scripts that let us measure whether something actually works
• Keep your work under version control, so what you build is recoverable and reviewable by anyone on the team

About You

A fresh graduate in electrical or electronic engineering, computer engineering, mechatronics, physics, or something adjacent. We care far more about how your mind works than about your degree. Particularly:

• You have built things. Something with a microcontroller, an FPGA or a circuit you designed, that you had to debug because the first version did not work.
• You are genuinely curious. Curious in the way where you have actually read the datasheet, or opened something up, because it bothered you not to know how it worked.
• You are careful with detail. In this work one wrong bit, or a signal a fraction too late, is enough to break everything. So a design that is nearly right is wrong.
• You can sit with confusion. A lot of the job is staring at a signal that makes no sense, or a system that has silently frozen, and working out why. Some people find that unbearable. We need the kind who find it interesting.
• You recover from being wrong. Most of what you try will not work the first time. That is expected. What matters is whether you get discouraged or get curious.
• You speak up early. When something is not working, tell us while the problem is still small.

What We Provide

• Direct mentorship from the founding engineering team. We will think problems through and work together rather than hand you answers
• AI tools for engineering and research, which we use heavily and will teach you to use well
• Real ownership, with support. You will grow into owning parts of the system, and you will not be left to carry it alone

We will teach you our toolchain and our way of working, but you should already be able to write a working program in C or C++.

Being Straight With You

This is an early-stage company. The work is demanding and there are intense stretches around building and testing. In return you get ownership and learning that is rare. A lot of it will feel hard before it feels rewarding, and much of the job is finding an answer that is not written down anywhere yet. If you want a job with a clear, fixed scope where someone already knows the method, this is not it. But if you want to build something that does not yet exist and to become the person who can do it, we would like to meet you.

How to Apply

Send the following to us:

• Your resume.
• Your work. Put together a short presentation of something you have designed or built. We are as interested in how you organise and explain it as in what you made, so treat it as you would a piece of work for the team. A few well-chosen pages are enough.
• A written response to one question: Tell us about something you did not understand, and what you did about it. It does not need to be scientific. We are interested in how you approach not knowing something