Firmware Engineer

The Bot Company

We're building a helpful robot for every home.

We're a small team of engineers, designers, and operators based in San Francisco. Our team comes from Tesla, Cruise, OpenAI, Google, Pixar, and many other great companies. In the past we've shipped to hundreds of millions of users and know what it takes to build amazing products and experiences.

Our team is deliberately lean to promote rapid decision making and do away with bureaucracy and hierarchy. Everyone is an IC and is empowered with massive scope, radical ownership, and direct responsibility. We work across the stack with a culture built for rapid iteration and fast execution.

What we look for in all candidates

All roles at The Bot Company demand extreme sharpness and the ability to move fast in high-intensity environments. Throughout the process, we expect candidates to demonstrate:

• Exceptional mental acuity: you think quickly, learn instantly, and reason across unfamiliar domains.

• Engineering curiosity: you naturally dig into how systems work, even outside your specialty.

• High performance mindset: you move fast, handle ambiguity, and excel when the environment is demanding.

Firmware Engineer

You'll architect and build the embedded systems that power the sensing, actuation, communication, and safety functions inside our robots. You'll define scalable firmware and system architectures while owning products from initial board bring-up through system integration, validation, manufacturing ramp, and large-scale production.

What You’ll Do

• Develop real-time firmware for robotic actuators, sensors, communications, and power systems.

• Own firmware from custom board bring-up through validation, production ramp, and sustained manufacturing.

• Build drivers and interfaces for ADCs, timers, PWM, DMA, SPI, I²C, UART, CAN, and other peripherals.

• Integrate encoders, force sensors, IMUs, current sensors, cameras, and other feedback devices.

• Collaborate with electrical, mechanical, controls, ML, test, and manufacturing engineers.

• Investigate hardware and firmware failures, manufacturing yield issues, and field reliability problems.

Requirements

• Strong embedded programming skills in C, C++, or Rust.

• Experience developing firmware for microcontrollers in bare-metal or RTOS environments.

• Strong understanding of interrupts, timing, concurrency, memory constraints, and real-time behavior.

• Experience bringing up custom hardware and debugging across firmware, electronics, and physical systems.

• Ability to read schematics, PCB layouts, and component datasheets.

• Familiarity with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, debuggers, and data-logging tools.

• Experience supporting physical products through validation, manufacturing ramp, or volume production.

• Strong ownership and ability to collaborate across engineering, manufacturing, and supplier teams.

Bonus Qualifications

• Hands-on NPI experience taking embedded products through EVT, DVT, and PVT into mass production.

• Experience working directly with contract manufacturers, joint development manufacturers, or original design manufacturers.

• Experience developing factory programming, calibration, functional-test, and end-of-line test systems.

• Motor-control experience, including FOC, actuators, closed-loop control, or power electronics.

• Experience integrating production camera pipelines, including MIPI CSI-2, GMSL, ISP configuration and tuning, camera synchronization, and hardware-accelerated video encoding or compression.

• Bootloaders, secure provisioning, firmware updates, production release management, or HIL testing.

Why Join

You’ll work with a small, elite team on challenges that require speed, intelligence, and deep engineering instinct. If you enjoy understanding systems at all levels, move fast, and think even faster, you’ll thrive here.