Firmware Engineer

The role

You will own the embedded software stack on wearable capture hardware. This involves firmware architecture, sensor integration, data pipelines, and connectivity for device-to-backend telemetry.

What you will do

• Firmware architecture on embedded Linux on ARM
• Manage system state machines including boot, capture, idle, and fault recovery
• Manage power management states and low-power transitions
• Develop drivers for cameras, IMUs, microphones, and environmental sensors
• Implement sub-millisecond cross-sensor synchronization and hardware-level timestamping
• Manage multi-stream concurrent capture and hardware video encoder pipelines
• Handle device-to-backend telemetry and secure OTA firmware updates
• Perform firmware-side board bring-up alongside electrical engineers
• Validate hardware interfaces including I2C, SPI, USB, and MIPI
• Diagnose timing, power sequencing, and communication faults

Required qualifications

• Strong C/C++ for embedded systems on ARM
• Python for testing, tooling, and automation
• Camera driver experience (V4L2 or equivalent)
• Deep familiarity with embedded interfaces: MIPI CSI-2, I2C, SPI, USB, interrupts
• Comfortable reading schematics and datasheets
• Knowledge of interrupts, race conditions, memory constraints, and real-time scheduling
• RTOS concepts and multi-threaded embedded environments

Nice to have

• Qualcomm, NXP, or Ambarella BSP experience
• SerDes driver integration
• Hardware H.264 / H.265 encoder pipelines
• Precise timing and synchronization (PTP, IEEE 1588)
• High-bandwidth data acquisition
• Sensor fusion and Kalman filter implementation
• OTA infrastructure for deployed fleets
• IoT telemetry stacks (MQTT, AWS IoT, Azure IoT Hub, or similar)
• ROS, MCAP, or Foxglove

About the company

Human Archive is a research lab backed by Y Combinator focused on modeling human embodied intelligence. Founded by Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers, the lab builds custom hardware products and publishes research.