Firmware Wizard

Job Description

About the Role
The Firmware Wizard will own WindBorne Systems’ entire firmware stack, working at the intersection of hardware and software to design, calibrate, and integrate custom sensors and control mechanisms for autonomous weather balloons. This role involves addressing unique challenges like extreme temperatures, limited power, and remote code updates, contributing to the mission of eliminating weather uncertainty.

What You’ll Do
• Develop and maintain drivers & low level libraries for new chips, modules, & sensors
• Own our custom open source RTOS hardware abstraction layer, Amslah. It has many custom features made for our unique application (I’m excited to tell you about them!) but but requires hardening and architecture refinements as we scale
• Push the limits of our custom sensor hardware & calibration infrastructure, ensuring our GSBs are power optimized & survive extreme cold beyond subcomponent specifications.
• Work closely with people doing R&D on novel hardware as we seek to improve the accuracy of our meteorological measurements.
• Design fault-tolerant systems that can recover gracefully from unexpected conditions
• Debug highly non-trivial issues

You’re a Good Fit If You
• Experience programming, shipping, and maintaining hardware in a real-world setting.
• Must be excited by rapid iteration more than trying to perfectly plan ahead of time
• Fluent in C/C++ and Python.
• Should have experience writing low-level drivers for a number of various chips.
• Should be comfortable reading PCB schematics.
• Be able to form hypothesis and run experiments about the behaviour of the system
• Must be an effective communicator, able to cut through misunderstandings to the core of an issue and reason about tradeoffs in complex multidisciplinary spaces
• Excellent debugging skills in complex settings.

Bonus Qualifications
• You ever so slightly look down on software engineers who only write interpreted languages, but you wouldn’t admit this because you are too nice.
• Have done a bit of EE yourself 🙂

Role Highlights & Compensation
• In office food
• Salary: $33/hr
• Location: 1600 Bridge Pwky, Redwood City, CA.
• In person required.