Lead, Firmware Engineer

You lead the firmware — hands-on — and you build the team that owns it. This is a Lead role, which at Queue means one specific thing: you carry the same technical bar as a Staff engineer (you still design, prototype, and debug the hard subsystems yourself), and you own the delivery of your people — you mentor, you hire, you set the loop, and you're accountable for what the firmware team ships, not just your own commits.

You own the firmware that physically moves the medication: the bare-metal / RTOS software on the motor-control microcontroller, the PreScript interface to the edge agent, the safety interlocks, and the sensor cross-checks that make an unsafe dispense structurally impossible. And you own the team that builds it as we scale from 5 robots to the field — recruiting, growing engineers, defining how firmware gets built and reviewed, and running the interview loop for your own hires.

You report to the Head of Software Engineering, work directly with the CTO on the motor-control and hardware interface, and partner with the edge and hardware teams on the interfaces between them.

Motor control, the PreScript firmware interface, sensor acquisition and cross-check, on-firmware safety state machines, and firmware observability — you still design and debug the hard parts yourself, and you set the standard for all of it.

Delivery through people — You're accountable for the firmware team's output: the roadmap, the estimates, the trade-offs, the ship. When the team delivers, that's the job; when it slips, that's yours to unblock.

Growing engineers — You mentor, you sponsor, you hand off responsibility as the team grows, and you develop people toward Senior and Staff. You lead by example and aren't above rolling up your sleeves.

Hiring & the loop — You define and run the firmware interview loop, calibrate the rubric, and make the hiring call. Everyone contributes to hiring; a Lead owns the loop.

Performance & standards — You run performance conversations honestly and set the quality bar the team is held to.

Cross-team interfaces — You own the firmware team's contracts with edge, hardware/CTO, and the broader software org, and communicate clearly across all of them.

How the Lead level is assessed — three things, and you can't trade one away: (1) communication — you make complex firmware legible to the CTO, the edge team, and non-firmware stakeholders, and write decisions down; (2) the delivery of your people — your team ships safe, correct firmware and grows while doing it; (3) technical implementation & quality — non-negotiable; you remain a hands-on engineer who sets the bar, not a manager-from-afar.

Day 30: Deep on the motor-control firmware and the team. First hands-on PR to a hard subsystem. Paired with the CTO on the hardware interface. A read on where the team is strong, where it's stretched, and what to hire for.

Day 60: Owning the firmware roadmap and the team's delivery. Firmware interview loop defined and running for your open reqs. Mentoring cadence established. A subsystem hardened under your standard.

Day 90: A full dispense driven through firmware you're accountable for, on real hardware, with the safety interlocks proven under fault. The team is delivering to a bar you set, at least one hire is in the loop, and the firmware quality standard is written down and enforced.

Ground-up builder: products you've taken from concept to production release.

Power electronics / gate drivers; Jetson / embedded Linux adjacency; robotics.

Healthcare or other regulated / audited industry experience.

Recruiter Screen (30 min)

Technical Interview (90 min) — a take-home walkthrough plus a live design exercise; we fix and improve together.

Design Interview (60 min) — a control/observability subsystem deep-dive.

Leadership Interview (60 min) — weighted toward team-building, delivery-through-people, and how you'd run and grow this team.

The technical bar is the Staff bar; the Leadership stage carries the Lead distinction.

Direct Patient Impact: Your team's firmware will improve healthcare outcomes for millions of patients

Market Leadership: Ground-floor opportunity to define an entirely new category of healthcare technology

Technical Innovation: Genuinely novel problems at the intersection of AI, robotics, and healthcare

Career Acceleration: Build and lead a team from the ground floor as the company scales

World-Class Team: Work alongside exceptional engineers, AI researchers, and healthcare experts

Direct Access: Work directly with the CTO on the hardware interface, with real autonomy and influence

Innovation Focus: Culture that prioritizes breakthrough thinking and rapid experimentation

Mission-Driven: United around transforming healthcare through technology

Servant Leadership: Make those around you better. We serve our teams the way Queue serves communities: 4,000 pharmacies close each year and deserts are spreading - we’re here to reverse that.

Do the Hard Things: Healthcare, hardware, and company-building are all hard. We do them anyway. Convenience for us is life-changing for those we serve.

Own Your Work: Be accountable; take pride in what you ship. Queue lives and dies by what you do - own it fully.

Default is Now: There’s never a better time than today. Default to action: what can we prove, learn, or simplify right now?

Contact: If you have any questions, please contact us at careers@queue.inc