Senior Firmware Engineer

Mountain View. Posted 6 months ago

The role

You will own the development of the low-level firmware stack for distributed real-time control across humanoid platforms. This involves designing, implementing, and validating firmware components for motor drivers, safety controllers, and perception nodes in an EtherCAT environment.

What you will do

Select and tune RTOS, define priorities, and optimize interrupt and DMA paths
Design, implement, and maintain low-level firmware for real-time motion control nodes over EtherCAT
Develop synchronization and communication layers ensuring deterministic cycle times
Configure and optimize EtherCAT masters and slaves
Implement real-time safety mechanisms
Collaborate with Electronics, Controls, and Systems teams
Contribute to the architecture of the hardware abstraction layer and firmware APIs
Develop unit, HIL, and integration tests for firmware validation
Profile and optimize ISR and DMA paths
Support bring-up and debugging of custom actuator controllers and sensor boards

Required qualifications

Bachelor's or higher in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Robotics
2+ years of experience in embedded firmware development for real-time control systems
Experience with low-level system interfaces (I2C, SPI, Ethernet, USB, CAN bus)
Experience with micro-controller firmware development across ARM Cortex-M and similar architectures
Proficiency in C/C++
Experience with low-level debugging (JTAG, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes)
Experience with real time operating systems (RTOS) (FreeRTOS, Zephyr RTOS)
Familiarity with SPI, I²C, UART, PWM, ADC, and sensor interface design
Ability to write reliable, well-structured, and maintainable embedded code in safety-critical environments
Evidence of shipping real-time-critical products

Nice to have

Embedded Linux software development
Board Support Package (BSP) development and integration on Linux-based platforms
Linux kernel programming: device tree, Kconfig, device drivers, kernel modules
Experience with GMSL2 and MIPI-CSI2 camera drivers (V4L2)
Experience with Field-Oriented Control (FOC) implementation for BLDC motor drives
Yocto Project / Bitbake for custom distribution builds

About the company

Rhoda AI is building the next generation of generalist intelligent robots. They own the full robotics stack from hardware to foundation world models.