Founding Engineer (Firmware/Systems)

About the role

A stealth, seed-stage startup building an AI-powered wearable platform for industrial field technicians is hiring a founding firmware/systems engineer. The product runs a real-time computer-vision and agentic AI system on smart-glasses hardware, with major data-center, energy and industrial customers. The role sits closest to the hardware: firmware work on the wearable device, plus the backend and edge layers around it. It is fully on-site in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Key responsibilities

• Flash, patch and adapt vendor firmware, working in embedded Linux/RTOS or device SDKs
• Evaluate camera and sensor hardware and define specs (field of view, battery, thermal, compute, latency) with the hardware ODM partner
• Build backend systems on a modern startup stack, close to the metal in C/C++/Rust
• Own a real-time multimodal pipeline end to end: capture and encoding, low-latency transport, low-latency model serving

Required profile

• 1-4 years of software engineering (more if exceptional), with founding-engineer or early-startup experience, or from an intense-culture company such as Tesla, SpaceX, Anduril or a top YC company
• Real firmware/embedded experience: vendor firmware work, embedded Linux/RTOS or device SDKs, and writing hardware specs
• Full-stack leaning back-end on a modern stack (AWS, GCP, Supabase, Railway)
• Owns a real-time multimodal pipeline end to end

Possibly valuable: edge/on-device inference, on-prem or air-gapped deployment (aerospace, defense, critical infrastructure), and hardware-to-software integration across wearables, cameras, robotics, IoT or drones.

What we offer

• Base salary of USD 150,000-200,000
• Equity of 2%-3%, higher for exceptional candidates
• Visa sponsorship available (O-1, TN, E-3, H-1B1, H-1B transfer, F-1 OPT/STEM OPT)
• Flexible hours for exceptional, senior talent; the founding team shares a house for the first few months before moving to a standard office

To apply, send a resume and a short description of a firmware or embedded system you have shipped.