Engineering Manager - Camera Firmware Platform

Engineering Manager – Camera Firmware Platform

San Mateo, CA United States

Who We Are

Verkada is transforming how organizations protect their people and places with an integrated, privacy-sensitive AI-powered platform that includes solutions for video security, access control, air quality sensors, alarms, intercoms, and visitor management.

We’ve got serious momentum in the market: more than 30,000 customers (including 100+ of the Fortune 500), a $5.8B valuation , more than $1 billion in annualized bookings, and backing from CapitalG, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Felicis Ventures, Next47 and more. Physical AI is one of the most consequential technology shifts of our time, and Verkada is at the center of it.

You can look at all kinds of communities to see our platform’s impact in the world. It's the retailer that uses our agentic AI to deter theft before it happens. The warehouse that uses AI-powered alerts to make sure its team is protected on the floor with proper PPE. The school that’s alerted to a threat in real-time and triggers a lockdown in seconds, not minutes. We’re rapidly scaling this impact: today, more than 2 million Verkada devices are deployed across 170+ countries.

About the Team

The Camera Firmware Platform team owns the foundation that every Verkada camera runs on. While our product firmware teams bring new camera categories to market, this team makes every camera in the fleet, both existing and future models, more reliable, faster, leaner, and more power-efficient.

• Edge Storage: We own the on-camera storage stack that turns every Verkada camera into a self-contained recording device. Our mandate is reliable, accessible, secure, and observable storage of customer video. Footage is preserved instantly across SD cards and raw NAND, even during network outages or sudden power loss, for millions of cameras and petabytes of video. This extends to the backend services that manage retention, cloud backup, and storage health across the fleet.
• Firmware Platform: Building on that foundation, we own the cross-cutting firmware systems underneath every camera feature: boot and shutdown, memory and power management, system state orchestration, IPC, observability, and firmware update. We build these once, for every camera model and SoC, so product teams can move fast without rebuilding the same infrastructure.

About the Role

As the Engineering Manager for Camera Firmware Platform, you will lead a highly technical team of storage and embedded systems engineers responsible for the reliability, performance, power, and stability of firmware running on a fleet of more than 1.8 million perpetually online devices. You will set the storage and platform roadmap, decide which fleet-wide investments matter most, and turn them into measurable improvements in footage retention, storage endurance, boot time, memory headroom, power draw, and crash rates.

You will partner closely with the Camera Firmware product team, Hardware, Streaming, Computer Vision, Cloud Infrastructure, Security, Manufacturing, and Product. You will also work with Verkada Linux, the shared OS layer across all Verkada product lines, to incubate platform capabilities on cameras and contribute them back for use across the company product lines.

This role combines deep technical leadership with people management. We are committed to a thriving in-office culture, and this role requires onsite presence at our HQ in San Mateo, CA.

What You'll Do

Lead the team

• Lead and grow a team of storage, firmware, and systems engineers, and recruit and retain top-tier embedded talent as the team expands its charter.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, career development, and execution management.
• Define the technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap for camera storage and firmware platform, balancing fleet-wide investments against support for new camera launches.
• Establish engineering best practices around testing, observability, incident response, root-cause analysis, and long-term maintainability.

Drive storage optimizations

• Storage stack and architecture: Own the on-camera storage stack end to end, including filesystems (ext4, UBIFS), video layout and indexing, SD/eMMC drivers, and raw NAND. Lead next-generation storage architecture such as new SD card modes, partition-level encryption, and secure deletion of expired footage.
• Reliability, endurance, and retention: Guarantee footage integrity through power loss, filesystem corruption, and failing media. Minimize write amplification with aligned, batched writes, and extend retention through index compression, smarter SD card capacity allocation, and better high versus low-quality stream storage.
• Storage observability: Build deep storage observability of SD and NAND health, erase counts, bad blocks, UBI counters, writes per hour, and retention metrics that feed release go/no-go decisions.
• Testing: Build hardware-in-the-loop testing for storage disaster cases such as full-period retention, OTA transitions across storage layout changes, partition reformats, EEPROM recovery, and SD controller firmware updates.
• Media qualification: Partner with Hardware teams and external flash vendors to evaluate, qualify, and validate next-generation storage media.
• Backend and network storage: Guide the evolution of storage-adjacent backend systems for retention, cloud backup, archives, and storage health notifications. Build on-premises storage appliances where cameras back up footage to RAID-backed hard drives over the LAN, with SMART-based drive health monitoring.
• Boot and shutdown: Optimize boot and shutdown paths across the boot stack, kernel, userspace services, and backend connection. This is critical for reducing downtime and maximizing video footage retention.
• System resources: Optimize memory, power, and network on resource‑constrained embedded devices. Reduce DRAM and flash footprint of firmware services. Prevent brownouts at peak load with power management schemes such as Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS). Make network traffic between device and backend more efficient and resilient with techniques such as retry backoff with jitter and connection consolidation.
• Device State Management: Orchestrate device-level state transitions such as system and service restarts, OTA, DSP pipeline restart, commissioning and decommissioning. Sequencing these operations in the correct order is critical for correct device function.
• Observability and debuggability: Add core dumps and stack traces for crashes, reliable IPC message delivery, power‑on self tests, standardized per‑service and fleet‑wide metrics, and system-wide log levels.
• Developer and release velocity: Improve build and kernel tooling, remote serial and flashing access, AI‑assisted code review and workflows, and standardized manufacturing release and flashing automation across camera models.
• Own fleet‑wide reliability metrics for retention, storage health, crash rates, memory pressure, boot time, and power, and make them visible in release go/no‑go decisions.
• Find and fix issues before customers notice them, using diagnostic data from across the fleet.

What You Bring

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience in embedded or systems software, including 2+ years leading or managing high‑performing systems, storage, platform, or infrastructure teams.
• Experience designing storage systems for continuous, high‑throughput write workloads, such as video recording.
• Strong expertise in systems programming in C/C++; experience with Go or other higher‑level languages preferred.
• Hands‑on experience profiling and optimizing system‑level performance, memory, and power on resource‑constrained devices.
• Experience designing concurrent userspace services and IPC mechanisms (shared memory, sockets, message queues) and reasoning about their trade‑offs.
• Experience debugging complex OS or storage issues in production, across large deployed fleets.
• Demonstrated success driving technical strategy and aligning multiple teams around shared platform investments.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence technical direction across Hardware, Firmware, Backend, and Product.
• Willingness and ability to work onsite five days per week.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with Linux kernel fundamentals and device drivers
• Experience with storage fundamentals: NAND flash behavior, filesystem fault tolerance, SD/eMMC protocols, partition tables, write amplification, and power‑loss protection.
• Experience with camera or video SoCs (e.g., Ambarella), ISP/DSP pipelines, or video encoding.
• Experience building firmware update, fleet observability, or device management systems for millions of IoT devices.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and backend systems.
• Experience with hard drives and RAID (e.g., mdadm, ZFS), SMART monitoring, or building NAS/NVR products.

US Employee Benefits

Verkada is committed to fostering a workplace environment that prioritizes the holistic health and wellbeing of our employees and their families by offering comprehensive wellness perks, benefits, and resources. Our benefits and perks programs include, but are not limited to:

• Healthcare programs that can be tailored to meet the personal health and financial well‑being needs - Premiums are 100% covered for the employee under at least one plan and 80% for family premiums under all plans
• Nationwide medical, vision and dental coverage
• Starting January 2027, Verkada will match a portion of an employee’s 401(k) contributions based on eligible earnings. Match vests on 2 year anniversary
• Health Saving Account (HSA) with annual employer contributions and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) with tax saving options
• Expanded mental health support
• Paid parental leave policy & fertility benefits
• Time off to relax and recharge through our paid holidays, firmwide extended holidays, flexible PTO and personal sick time
• Wellness/fitness benefits
• Healthy lunches provided daily

Additional Information

• We do sponsor and take over sponsorship of employment visas for this role. If we make you an offer, we will make every reasonable effort to get you a visa.

Annual Pay Range

At Verkada, we want to attract and retain the best employees, and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contribution to the company. With that in mind, we carefully consider a number of factors to determine the appropriate starting pay for an employee, including their primary work location and an assessment of a candidate's skills and experience, as well as market demands and internal parity. A Verkada employee may be eligible for additional forms of compensation, depending on their role, including sales incentives, discretionary bonuses, and/or equity in the company in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs)

Below is the annual on-target earnings (OTE) range for full‑time employees for this position, comprised of base compensation and commissions (if applicable).

$200,000 - $315,000 USD

As an equal opportunity employer, Verkada is committed to providing employment opportunities to all individuals. All applicants for positions at Verkada will be treated without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

Voluntary Self-Identification

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As set forth in Verkada’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

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