Staff Firmware Engineer

About the position

Sofar is on a mission to connect the world’s oceans. We design, build, and deploy the largest privately owned network of marine weather sensors to power the world’s best marine weather forecasts. Our data helps our customers to increase efficiency and reduce emissions, delivering tools to governments and other stakeholders to understand impacts of climate change on extreme weather and ocean health. We live on Planet Ocean, and our goal is to create the ocean intelligence needed to ensure a sustainable future. You will be a key contributor to the embedded firmware design and implementation of all our hardware products: Spotter, Smart Mooring, next generation platforms and Sofar’s new open hardware connectivity stack — Bristlemouth. You thrive in small and collaborative multidisciplinary teams, and are eager to pitch in to debug and solve gnarly issues. You take pride in your craft. You strive to improve the health of our oceans and planet by shipping a cohesive, elegant and impactful product. This role will be working onsite from our Pier 28 office at least 3 days per week and reporting to our Firmware Engineering Manager.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement efficient and maintainable FreeRTOS firmware with automated unit and integration tests in a mix of C and C++
• Break down complex efforts into parallelizable work streams for your team
• Implement host-side test, analysis and automation tools in Python
• Participate in code reviews, brainstorms and whiteboard sessions with your team
• Write crystal clear specifications and documentation for both external users and internal colleagues
• Work alongside electrical and mechanical engineers in designing, integrating, testing and debugging systems
• Advocating for the highest leverage features and fixes in product prioritization conversations
• Execute frequent releases for internal proprietary firmware as well as open source Bristlemouth firmware, following test plans, building installers, writing release notes, and announcing the releases in friendly and inviting communications for wide audiences

Requirements

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Strong systems thinking ability
• Solid foundation of software architecture principles
• At least 8 years of professional embedded firmware/software experience
• Prior experience as a tech lead for a firmware team
• Fluent in embedded C and C++
• Comfortable in Python
• Experience with FreeRTOS
• Breadth of technology experience including multiple embedded platforms
• An understanding of common hardware peripherals and interfaces

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with multiple forms of radio telemetry
• Experience with IPv6 networking
• Experience with ARM Cortex-M0, M4, and M33 cores
• Past work in IoT, robotics, drones and/or automotive products
• A passion for or connection to the ocean

Benefits

• Estimated Salary Range: $160,000 - $190,000