Founding Engineer (Firmware/Systems)

About this role

Founding Engineer (Firmware/Systems)
On-site · Engineering, Product & Tech · Full time San Francisco, California, United States

Description
Our client is a stealth, seed-stage startup building an AI-powered wearable platform for industrial field technicians - running a real-time computer-vision and agentic AI system directly on smart-glasses hardware, live today with major data-center, energy, and industrial customers across multiple countries. Backed by a $5M seed round and founded by researchers from Harvard/NASA (computer vision, published at NeurIPS and ICCV) and MIT (machine learning, ex-quant researcher).
The bet: computer vision and agentic vision-language models (VLMs) grounded in real integrations with legacy enterprise systems (ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce) - not another LLM wrapper. The industrial data this generates is also laying the groundwork for robotics automation down the line.
This is the systems seat closest to the hardware: real work on the wearable device itself, plus the backend and edge layers around it. Firmware experience is a genuine requirement here.
What you'll do
Flash, patch, and adapt vendor firmware; work in embedded Linux/RTOS or device SDKs
Evaluate camera/sensor hardware and define specs (FOV, battery, thermal, compute, latency) alongside the hardware ODM partner
Build backend systems on a modern startup stack, comfortable close to the metal (C/C++/Rust)
Own a real-time multimodal pipeline end-to-end: capture/encoding, low-latency transport, low-latency model serving

Location & culture
Fully on-site in the SF Bay Area. The founding team lives and works together for the first several months in a shared house before moving to a standard office — expect an intense, in-person, high-ownership culture. Hours flex for exceptional, senior talent; the priority is getting the right person, not saving on salary.
Requirements
Essential
1–4 years software engineering (more if exceptional); founding-engineer/early-startup experience, or from an intense-culture company (e.g. Tesla, SpaceX, Anduril, top YC)
Real firmware/embedded experience: vendor firmware work, embedded Linux/RTOS or device SDKs, hardware spec-writing
Back-end-leaning full-stack on a modern stack (AWS, GCP, Supabase, Railway), comfortable in C/C++/Rust
Owns a real-time multimodal pipeline end-to-end
Particularly valuable
Edge/on-device inference
On-prem/air-gapped deployment experience (aerospace, defense, critical infrastructure)
Hardware-to-software integration across wearables, cameras, robotics, IoT, or drones
Benefits
Compensation & benefits
Base: $150K–$200K
Equity: 2%–3% (flexed higher for exceptional candidates)
Visa sponsorship available (O-1, TN, E-3, H-1B1, H-1B transfer, F-1 OPT/STEM OPT)

How to apply: resume plus a short description of a firmware/embedded system you've shipped.