Embedded Software Engineer - Safety-Critical UAV Systems & Firmware

About the job Embedded Software Engineer - Safety-Critical UAV Systems & Firmware


Our client is seeking an Embedded Software Engineer to support the development of a compact, safety-critical electromechanical subsystem integrated into a small unmanned aerial platform. The firmware controls low-power compute, mixed-signal interfaces, safety logic, and sensor-driven state behavior. The system must operate reliably under vibration, shock, environmental stress, and field handling while maintaining strict fail-safe behavior.

The current codebase uses Rust (Embassy), but strong embedded engineers in C, C++, or Rust are equally welcome.

In this role, you will own firmware end-to-end - from architecture and drivers to state machines, bring-up, testing, and qualification.

Onsite | No Visa Sponsorship | No Relocation Assistance

Training: Must complete a 1-month onsite onboarding period in West Virginia.

Locations: San Francisco | Los Angeles | Washington, DC

Responsibilities:

• Support OTA/programming flows and production readiness.
• Define and enforce the firmware-side safety case and documentation.
• Carry firmware through environmental qualification (thermal, EMC, vibration)
• Work closely with hardware engineers on bring-up, register maps, timing, and system integration.
• Build a host-testable simulation layer so the state machine can be tested on a laptop without flashing hardware.
• Own embedded firmware architecture, drivers, communication protocols, command surfaces, and state-machine logic.

Qualifications (Must-Haves)

• Working English, written and verbal.
• Experience building deterministic state machines for real-world hardware.
• Strong discipline around testability, including host-based testing and simulation.
• Deep understanding of interrupts, DMA, clocks, timers, low-power modes, linker scripts, and memory maps.
• Strong experience with I²C, SPI, UART, USB CDC, and debugging using oscilloscopes and logic analyzers.
• 5+ years of professional embedded firmware experience on ARM Cortex-M or comparable MCUs using C, C++, or Rust.
• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a closely related field.

Nice-to-Haves:

• C FFI / SDK bindings.
• Modern C++ firmware (C++17/20)
• Bootloader / DFU / secure-boot experience.
• Async firmware experience (Embassy, Zephyr, FreeRTOS)
• FPV or small-UAV firmware experience (Betaflight, MAVLink, INAV)
• Background in safety-critical firmware (ISO 26262, DO-178C, IEC 61508)
• Rust embedded experience (Embassy, embedded-hal, defmt, probe-rs, RTIC, no_std)