Firmware Engineer

The role

You will own the software closest to Asimov's hardware, from bare-metal joint controllers to embedded Linux. You will design, implement, and test real-time firmware and manage the embedded Linux platform.

What you will do

• Design, implement, and test real-time firmware in C/C++ for joint controllers, sensor boards, and power management
• Own the embedded Linux platform on Asimov's onboard compute
• Bring up new board revisions alongside the electrical team
• Build and maintain the communication layer between joints and the main compute stack
• Own bootloader, flashing, and firmware update flows across every board
• Integrate sensors including IMUs, encoders, force-torque, and camera interfaces
• Implement safety and fault handling
• Debug across the hardware-software boundary using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and bus sniffers
• Build test automation to catch regressions
• Contribute to Menlo's open-source efforts

Required qualifications

• 3 or more years of hands-on firmware or embedded software experience on products that ship and run in the real world
• Strong C and C++ in resource-constrained, real-time environments
• Python for tooling, test automation, and calibration scripts
• Practical embedded Linux experience: kernel and driver work, device trees, cross-compilation toolchains, and a build system such as Yocto or Buildroot
• Solid grounding in real-time systems: interrupt latency, scheduling, jitter, priority inversion
• Deep familiarity with hardware interfaces including SPI, I2C, CAN, UART, and camera interfaces such as MIPI CSI-2 or GMSL
• Comfort reading schematics and datasheets
• Debugging with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG/SWD, and bus analyzers
• Strong communication skills to drive alignment across electrical, mechanical, and controls teams

Nice to have

• Experience with bipedal or humanoid robots, legged locomotion platforms, or other high-DOF electromechanical systems
• Motor control firmware experience: FOC commutation, current/velocity/position loops, encoder calibration, and fault protection
• RTOS experience (Zephyr, FreeRTOS) or PREEMPT_RT and real-time tuning on Linux
• Time-sensitive networking, or other deterministic fieldbus and distributed clock synchronization
• Secure boot, signed images, and over-the-air update infrastructure
• Familiarity with ROS 2 and how firmware-level data reaches the autonomy stack
• Hardware-in-the-loop test rigs and CI for firmware
• Board bring-up experience across multiple hardware revisions of the same product

About the company

Menlo Research is an Applied R&D lab building Asimov, an open-source humanoid robot platform. They build across the full stack including hardware architecture, locomotion, autonomy, simulation, and infrastructure.