Embedded Firmware Engineer at Sophia Space Inc — Pasadena, USA | Base Career

We are seeking a Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer to develop and integrate flight-critical embedded software for Sophia Space’s avionics systems and Tile platform.

This role requires deep hands-on experience with hardware bring-up, low-level firmware development, and close collaboration across avionics hardware, systems, and software teams.

This is a highly technical, execution-driven role in a fast-moving startup environment.

You will be responsible for bringing new avionics hardware boards from first power-on through stable, flight-ready operation, while ensuring firmware interfaces and drivers integrate cleanly with Jetson-based compute nodes and higher-level platform software.

The ideal candidate has extensive hands-on experience writing bootloaders, BSPs, and HALs; reading schematics; probing signals on the bench; and designing resilient embedded software that operates autonomously in constrained, mission-critical environments

Team: Tile Development Team Hiring Authority: VP of Engineering Role / Title: Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer (Avionics / Platform Interface) Level: Engineer IV Location: In Person

We are seeking a Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer to develop and integrate flight-critical embedded software for Sophia Space’s avionics systems and Tile platform.

This role requires deep hands-on experience with hardware bring-up, low-level firmware development, and close collaboration across avionics hardware, systems, and software teams.

This is a highly technical, execution-driven role in a fast-moving startup environment.

Design and implement bootloaders, BSPs, HALs, and low-level device drivers tightly coupled to custom avionics hardware.
Bring up new ARM-based flight boards from first power-on through stable firmware operation, working directly from schematics and hardware documentation
Build firmware using bare-metal and/or RTOS architectures with deterministic timing and fault tolerance.
Develop low-level flight firmware as part of system fault tolerance to, including command and telemetry handling, health monitoring, FDIR, safe-mode behavior, and autonomous recovery.
Customize and integrate Jetson Linux platforms, including boot chain, device tree, kernel bring-up, and MCU to Jetson interfaces.
Debug and resolve hardware–software integration issues, collaborating closely with avionics and systems engineers through test and flight readiness.
Implement and validate power sequencing, reset handling, watchdogs, interrupt
handling, DMA, and linker configurations.
Customize and integrate Jetson Linux platforms, including boot chain configuration, device tree updates, kernel bring-up, and MCU-to-Jetson interfaces.
Debug and resolve hardware–software integration issues using JTAG/SWD, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other bench tools.
Collaborate closely with avionics hardware, systems, and mission teams through integration testing, protoflight activities, and flight readiness reviews.
Develop and maintain MCU-side firmware supporting power, thermal, communications, and telemetry functions.
Support and evolve redundant communication paths (e.g., dual CAN) for coordination, monitoring, and fault tolerance. Define, document, and maintain stable firmware interfaces consumed by higher-level platform software.
Partner with software engineers to ensure firmware behavior aligns with system-level requirements and operational constraints.
Contribute to embedded build automation, reproducibility, and test infrastructure where appropriate.

7+ years of hands-on embedded firmware development experience in the aerospace, robotics, automotive, or other safety- or mission-critical systems environments.
Expert-level proficiency in C/C++ for embedded systems.
Strong experience with ARM Cortex-M (M4/M5/M7 or similar) architectures.
Proven experience developing bootloaders, BSPs, HALs, and hardware-facing device drivers.
Demonstrated ability to bring up new hardware from schematics to working firmware.
Strong understanding of power sequencing, resets, watchdogs, interrupts, DMA, and linker scripts.
Hands-on debugging experience with JTAG/SWD, oscilloscopes, and logic analyzers.
Experience working with embedded Linux systems (Jetson or similar platforms)
Ability to operate independently and take full ownership in a startup environment

Familiarity with flight software architectures and fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR) concepts.
Experience with RTOS environments such as FreeRTOS, RTEMS, RTLinux, or Embassy
Experience with radiation-tolerant or space-grade MCUs
Familiarity with embedded communication protocols such as CAN, RS485, SPI, I2C, UART, SpaceWire, or CCSDS telemetry systems
Experience with secure boot, image signing, and in-field firmware update strategies
Experience to CI/CD pipeline or automated build environments for embedded systems
Experience with supporting protoflight or flight hardware and design reviews

Embedded Firmware Engineer

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