Job Description

Senior Embedded Systems Engineer – Firmware

Location: San Francisco Bay Area or Remote

Description

Location: San Francisco Bay Area (Hybrid) or Remote

Join an ambitious team revolutionizing embedded AI at femtoAI! We’re delivering state-of-the-art deep learning solutions to run on our company’s custom hardware. The Sparse Processing Unit (SPU) chip leverages neural compression techniques like sparsity to push the envelope on performance and efficiency. As a leading startup in embedded AI, we’re redefining what’s possible in everyday devices like earbuds, hearing aids, home appliances, vehicles, and beyond.

About the Role

We’re building the next generation of AI-enabled embedded systems, and we need an embedded engineer to own the firmware that powers our system-on-chip (SoC) and reference designs. You’ll be working with a first-of-its-kind novel AI co-processor, and your designs will be deployed on thousands of end-devices that include femtoAI’s Sparse Processing Unit (SPU) chip!

While your primary responsibility will focus on firmware development for the SPU’s RISC-V management processor and host microcontrollers, you will also participate in internal and external design reviews for many hardware and software projects, implement new product features, build experimental demos, and design test benches for our bleeding edge test chips.

Responsibilities

• Develop firmware for the SPU’s RISC-V management processor, including datapath design and control between host MCU, accelerator, and peripheral interfaces.
• Design and maintain file formats to deploy custom firmware and AI models from Flash.
• Maintain CI systems for core firmware (Raspberry Pi, Github Actions).
• Translate customer feedback from production systems into firmware enhancements.
• Participate in PCB design reviews and work with hardware engineers and customers to bring up new designs.
• Own your projects without micromanagement. Efficient communication of project status, blockers, and design decisions is key.

Requirements

The candidate must have:

• Strong embedded C/C++ skills and experience writing firmware and drivers for microcontrollers.
• Experience designing for extremely power constrained systems (1mW is a lot of power to us)
• Experience and understanding of board-level communication protocols (I²S, I²C, SPI, PDM, UART, GPIO) and audio/control data streaming.
• Comfort designing file formats or bootloading schemes for firmware and AI model loading.
• Proficiency debugging with logic analyzers, debuggers, oscilloscopes, and other bring-up tools. Whether the bug is in the firmware, hardware, silicon, or AI models — you should have the drive and ability to work across teams to find the source.
• Proficiency with unit testing, integration testing, regression testing, and hardware-in-the-loop testing in Python.
• Ability to independently own projects and deliver production-quality results. We will do design reviews, but you will own code that directly faces customers.

The ideal candidate will also have:

• Experience designing with RISC-V and ARM cortex-m microcontrollers
• Experience with PCB design
• Experience contributing to open-source firmware or driver libraries.
• Familiarity with AI inference, accelerators, and audio-based models
• Familiarity with Xilinx SoC tools
• 401(k)
• Medical insurance
• Vision insurance
• Disability insurance
• Paid maternity leave
• Paid paternity leave
• Child care support

femtoAI is an equal opportunity employer committed to a diverse workforce which strives to create an inclusive working environment empowering everyone to do their best work. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

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