Embedded Firmware Engineer at Sophia Space in Pasadena, CA

Sophia Space is a venture-backed deep technology company building high-performance, energy-efficient computing systems designed to operate in orbit. Our work sits at the intersection of aerospace systems, advanced computing, and applied physics, supporting early customers and partners across defense, intelligence, and commercial space markets.

We are currently at the Seed stage, scaling our engineering organization and lab infrastructure as we move from technical validation into early commercial deployments. The company is headquartered in California, with primary engineering and lab operations based in Southern California. Over the coming year, Sophia will continue expanding its team, maturing internal systems, and relocating to a new lab facility during the summer.

Team: Tile Development Team Hiring Authority: VP of Engineering Role / Title: Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer (Avionics / Platform Interface) Level: Engineer IV Location: In Person

Job Description

We are seeking a Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer to develop and integrate flight-critical embedded software for Sophia Space’s avionics systems and Tile platform. This role requires deep hands-on experience with hardware bring-up, low-level firmware development, and close collaboration across avionics hardware, systems, and software teams.

This is a highly technical, execution-driven role in a fast-moving startup environment. You will be responsible for bringing new avionics hardware boards from first power-on through stable, flight-ready operation, while ensuring firmware interfaces and drivers integrate cleanly with Jetson-based compute nodes and higher-level platform software. The ideal candidate has extensive hands-on experience writing bootloaders, BSPs, and HALs; reading schematics; probing signals on the bench; and designing resilient embedded software that operates autonomously in constrained, mission-critical environments

Location & Eligibility

This position is primarily in-person in Pasadena, California, with occasional hybrid flexibility based on business needs.

U.S. Person status is required due to expected relevance of ITAR/EAR export-control regulations. U.S. Persons generally include U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents (green card holders), and certain protected individuals as defined by applicable regulations.

Primary Responsibilities

• Design and implement bootloaders, BSPs, HALs, and low-level device drivers tightly coupled to custom avionics hardware.
• Bring up new ARM-based flight boards from first power-on through stable firmware operation, working directly from schematics and hardware documentation
• Build firmware using bare-metal and/or RTOS architectures with deterministic timing and fault tolerance.
• Develop low-level flight firmware as part of system fault tolerance to, including command and telemetry handling, health monitoring, FDIR, safe-mode behavior, and autonomous recovery.
• Customize and integrate Jetson Linux platforms, including boot chain, device tree, kernel bring-up, and MCU to Jetson interfaces.
• Debug and resolve hardware–software integration issues, collaborating closely with avionics and systems engineers through test and flight readiness.
• Implement and validate power sequencing, reset handling, watchdogs, interrupt
• handling, DMA, and linker configurations.
• Customize and integrate Jetson Linux platforms, including boot chain configuration, device tree updates, kernel bring-up, and MCU-to-Jetson interfaces.
• Debug and resolve hardware–software integration issues using JTAG/SWD, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other bench tools.
• Collaborate closely with avionics hardware, systems, and mission teams through integration testing, protoflight activities, and flight readiness reviews.
• Develop and maintain MCU-side firmware supporting power, thermal, communications, and telemetry functions.
• Support and evolve redundant communication paths (e.g., dual CAN) for coordination, monitoring, and fault tolerance. Define, document, and maintain stable firmware interfaces consumed by higher-level platform software.
• Partner with software engineers to ensure firmware behavior aligns with system-level requirements and operational constraints.
• Contribute to embedded build automation, reproducibility, and test infrastructure where appropriate.

Required Skills

• 7+ years of hands-on embedded firmware development experience in the aerospace, robotics, automotive, or other safety- or mission-critical systems environments.
• Expert-level proficiency in C/C++ for embedded systems.
• Strong experience with ARM Cortex-M (M4/M5/M7 or similar) architectures.
• Proven experience developing bootloaders, BSPs, HALs, and hardware-facing device drivers.
• Demonstrated ability to bring up new hardware from schematics to working firmware.
• Strong understanding of power sequencing, resets, watchdogs, interrupts, DMA, and linker scripts.
• Hands-on debugging experience with JTAG/SWD, oscilloscopes, and logic analyzers.
• Experience working with embedded Linux systems (Jetson or similar platforms)
• Ability to operate independently and take full ownership in a startup environment

Desired Skills

• Familiarity with flight software architectures and fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR) concepts.
• Experience with RTOS environments such as FreeRTOS, RTEMS, RTLinux, or Embassy
• Experience with radiation-tolerant or space-grade MCUs
• Familiarity with embedded communication protocols such as CAN, RS485, SPI, I2C, UART, SpaceWire, or CCSDS telemetry systems
• Experience with secure boot, image signing, and in-field firmware update strategies
• Experience to CI/CD pipeline or automated build environments for embedded systems
• Experience with supporting protoflight or flight hardware and design reviews