Senior Software Integration Engineer

About the Company

We are a renewable energy and ocean technology company committed to rapidly developing and deploying technologies that will ensure a sustainable future for Earth by unlocking the vast energy potential of its oceans. Our focus is on capturing civilizational levels of ultra-low-cost renewable energy for applications including computing and affordable renewable fuels delivered to shore.

The company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in Portland, Oregon and backed by leading venture capitalists, philanthropic investors, university endowments, and private investment offices. We operate as an idea meritocracy in which the best ideas change the company's direction on a regular basis.

About the Job

Our core technology is the Node, a device that produces energy in the ocean's harshest conditions for years without human maintenance or intervention. Making that possible is the onboard software, which transforms a collection of hardware into a system that can sense, actuate, follow commands from shore, as well as operate autonomously.

As a Senior Software Integration Engineer on the Core Electronics & Software team, you'll keep our team running smoothly by owning integration across the full software stack - from the lower-level firmware on our embedded devices, to the higher-level software on our flight computer responsible for telemetry and command, up to the autonomy and GNC layers.

You'll be the person who keeps integration moving. When issues arise, you'll be the first to step in: tracing it across the software and firmware boundary, driving it to resolution with the right people or implementing the fix yourself. Day to day, you'll keep our software continuously tested and releasable so the team can ship changes with confidence. And you'll make sure the teams that depend on our systems - for testing, operations, and beyond - have the data and tooling they need.

Just as important, you'll think beyond the immediate fix: shaping our long-term testing strategy, building the automation and infrastructure that catch issues early and cheaply, and helping the team develop the habits that steadily reduce the problems that surface during software integration. We want to ensure that as the system grows in complexity, releasing software gets easier, not harder.

You'll be part of a small team that we expect to grow, and you'll have the opportunity to help shape and mentor it as it does.

Responsibilities

• Act as the first responder for software integration issues: triage incoming problems and reproduce them, determine root cause, propose solutions, and drive issues to resolution in coordination with subsystem owners. Maintain situational awareness across subsystems so you can quickly tell where a problem lives and who needs to be looped in.
• Hold the bar in verifying the correct end-to-end behavior across the software stack - closely examine the integrated system as a whole to confirm it behaves as intended and meets requirements.
• Serve as the feedback conduit between the Core team and the teams across the company that depend on our software systems: validate that the right data and behavior are surfaced for testing and operations, and channel findings, gaps, and new requirements back to the product teams to drive the next iteration.
• Develop automated system integration tooling and strategies for processor-in-the-loop (PIL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing: building the harnesses, fixtures, and automation that let us exercise flight software against simulated and real conditions repeatably and at scale. Invest in observability (dashboards, alerts) to surface system health to spot problems early and automatically.
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines that continuously build, test, and exercise our software systems. Ensure that we are surfacing issues during development cycles prior to release to expensive test rigs and deployments.
• Manage and execute software releases to our various test rigs, including hardware-in-the-loop test beds, system / hardware acceptance test beds, software / communication test beds. Define and enforce release criteria, versioning, configuration control for our software / firmware products and ensure compatibility to deployed hardware.
• Ensure we have robust and tested mechanisms for Over-The-Air (OTA) software / firmware updates for all components under nominal and off-nominal scenarios. Ensure backward compatibility between current deployable firmware and older deployable and permanent firmware already in the field.
• Capture institutional knowledge so the team can scale beyond any one person: clear integration procedures, triage documents for when things go wrong, and the verification data to show flight readiness.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years working on embedded, real-time, or deployed mission-critical systems
• Proficiency in Rust, or strong systems-programming experience (C/C++) with a demonstrated ability to become productive in Rust quickly
• Strong proficiency in Python for building test automation and tooling
• Experience building or operating PIL and HIL test setups, deploying software to them, automating test procedures
• Experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
• Experience across the embedded-to-application boundary: bare-metal or RTOS-based firmware on microcontrollers (e.g., STM32 / Cortex-M) communicating with higher-level software on embedded Linux (e.g., Yocto), over common hardware interfaces (UART, SPI, I2C, CAN, etc.)
• Experience across the networking layer: coordination between systems over an IP stack (TCP/UDP), with comfort debugging communication across a networked stack
• Hardware debugging skills with tools like bus monitors, logic analyzers, and oscilloscopes
• Experience with software release management, versioning, and configuration control
• Proven ability to debug and troubleshoot across the software / firmware / hardware boundary under time pressure
• Able to communicate clearly verbally and in writing, can coordinate and build relationships within and across teams, and keep work organized when juggling multiple concurrent issues

Desired Qualifications

• Experience in a regulated or mission-critical domain (aerospace, defense, automotive, marine, medical, or similar)
• Experience designing and testing OTA updates, including staged rollouts, rollback, and backward / forward-compatibility verification
• Experience testing systems under degraded or intermittent connectivity - satellite links (e.g., Starlink, Iridium), cellular, or other high-latency / lossy network environments
• Experience building observability tooling: dashboards, alerting, and log / telemetry analysis
• Familiarity with autonomy, GNC, or other higher-level control software and how it integrates with the rest of the stack
• Knowledge of simulation and modeling for test - sensor and actuator models, plant models, model-based testing
• Experience with requirements traceability and verification / validation (V&V)
• A track record of building tools and processes that made an engineering team faster or more reliable

Compensation and Benefits

If hired for this full-time role, you will receive:

• Cash compensation of $175,000 - $230,000
• Equity in the company. We're all owners and if we're successful, this equity should be far and away the most valuable component of your compensation.
• A benefits package that helps you take care of yourself and your family, including:
  
  • Flexible paid time off
  • Health insurance (the company pays 100% of gold level PPO plan for full time employees, their partners, and dependents)
  • Dental insurance (the company pays 100% for full time employees, their partners and dependents)
  • Vision insurance (the company pays 100% for full time employees, their partners, and dependents)
  • Disability insurance (the company pays 100% for a policy to provide long term financial support if you become disabled)
  • Ability to contribute to tax-advantaged accounts, including 401(k), health FSA, and dependent care FSA.
• Relocation assistance to facilitate your move to Portland (if needed).

Location

This role is based in Portland, Oregon, and onsite work is preferred given how hands-on integration is with our hardware and test rigs. We're open to a hybrid arrangement for an excellent candidate, with the expectation that you can be in Portland on a day's notice to support the team when needed. Over time, we'd expect you to invest in the tooling and infrastructure - remote access to test rigs, automation, and observability - that makes integration less dependent on any one person being physically present, including yourself.