Firmware Engineer - Bluetooth / Wireless Devices

Role : Firmware Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA (on-site)

Employment Type: Full-time

Compensation: $180,000–$240,000 base salary + meaningful equity

A high-growth, venture-backed consumer technology company is hiring a Firmware Engineer to join a small, high-impact mobile team.

This is an opportunity for a Firmware Engineer to take meaningful ownership of embedded development for a flagship connected-device product. You will work closely with hardware, manufacturing, product, and software teams to bring new devices from prototype through production and continuously improve the experience for an installed global fleet.

What You’ll Do

• Design, develop, and maintain production firmware for connected consumer hardware using C/C++.
• Bring up and integrate new sensors, peripherals, and communication interfaces into current and future hardware platforms.
• Partner with electrical and hardware engineering teams on prototyping, board bring-up, debugging, schematic review, and hardware validation.
• Develop low-level drivers and communication protocols across interfaces such as UART, I2C, SPI, USB, and DMA-based systems.
• Build reliable firmware for compute-constrained, memory-constrained embedded environments.
• Help define and improve firmware architecture, coding standards, development workflows, automated testing, observability, and release processes.
• Support device-fleet health through telemetry, debugging tools, logging, monitoring, and over-the-air firmware updates.
• Collaborate with manufacturing and operations partners to develop production test strategies and deliver high-quality devices at scale.
• Diagnose complex hardware/firmware issues using tools such as logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and device logs.
• Take end-to-end ownership of firmware features—from technical design and implementation through validation, manufacturing readiness, release, and post-launch support.
• Work in a fast-moving, high-autonomy environment where firmware decisions directly affect the customer experience and product roadmap.

Required Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a substantial focus on embedded firmware development.
• Strong hands-on C/C++ experience in production embedded systems.
• Experience developing software for low-memory, compute-constrained devices.
• Strong understanding of peripheral drivers, hardware interfaces, and communication protocols, including UART, I2C, SPI, USB, and DMA.
• Experience bringing up new hardware and debugging issues across firmware, electrical systems, sensors, and peripherals.
• Ability to read and interpret datasheets, schematics, board layouts, and hardware documentation.
• Experience shipping and maintaining firmware across a large deployed device fleet.
• Familiarity with telemetry, remote diagnostics, firmware monitoring, and OTA update systems.
• Experience building engineering or test tooling in Python and/or Node.js.
• Strong problem-solving skills, sound technical judgment, and the ability to operate independently in an iterative product environment.
• Clear communication skills and comfort collaborating across hardware, software, product, manufacturing, and operations teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with bare-metal firmware, low-level task management, or environments without a traditional RTOS.
• Experience developing firmware for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or other wireless-connected devices.
• Background in consumer hardware, connected devices, IoT, health technology, fitness technology, or other high-volume physical products.
• Experience building automated hardware-in-the-loop testing, manufacturing test systems, or firmware CI/CD workflows.
• Familiarity with embedded security practices, secure boot, device authentication, encrypted communications, or secure OTA update design.
• Experience improving firmware observability, reliability, test coverage, deployment safety, or fleet-management capabilities.
• Comfortable working with globally distributed engineering and manufacturing partners.
• Experience in a startup or high-growth environment where engineers have broad ownership and rapidly evolving priorities.