Senior Embedded Engineer

Startup Atlas; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 70,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Office in Amsterdam Jordaan

Hybrid work option

Laptop provided

Team events

Job summary

NOWATCH, an Amsterdam-based health-tech company, is seeking a Senior Embedded Engineer to build production-grade firmware for our wearable platform.

You’ll work on C code, Zephyr RTOS, and Nordic nRF platforms, optimizing BLE, power, and system architecture while collaborating with R&D, QA, and mobile teams to deliver a seamless user experience.

Qualifications

• Firmware experience for wearables/IoT with low-power focus.
• Strong C skills and Zephyr RTOS on Nordic platforms.
• Experience with BLE, drivers, and hardware bring-up.

Responsibilities

• Assemble modular, production-grade firmware for NOWATCH.
• Develop efficient BLE communication and power optimization.
• Bring up new boards and implement device drivers.
• Collaborate with R&D, QA, and mobile teams on firmware features.
• Support CI/CD integration and hardware-in-the-loop testing.

Skills

Firmware development

Low-power design

C

BLE

Zephyr RTOS

Nordic nRF

Debugging

Tools

Zephyr tooling

CMake

West

Docker / CI

JTAG

Job description

The world’s first Awareable™ that connects the dots between your mental and physical health with advanced health tracking disguised as a classic watch.

NOWATCH is seeking a Senior Embedded Engineer with expertise in C, Zephyr RTOS, and Nordic nRF platform to develop robust firmware for wearable devices, focusing on BLE communication, low-power design, and embedded architecture.

Job Description

Senior Embedded Engineer

• Hybrid
• Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
• R&D

We are looking for a Senior Embedded Engineer with proven experience in developing robust, production-grade firmware in C and Zephyr RTOS.

Company Description

NOWATCH is an Amsterdam-based health innovation company for the curious. By blending cutting-edge technology with the leading science around mental health, we explore the frontiers of wellbeing. WATCH pioneers in the wearable market with new algorithms and sensors. Our hardware and software solution is part of a large and growing wearable industry.

Job Description

We are looking for a Senior Embedded Engineer with proven experience in developing robust, production-grade firmware in C, using Zephyr RTOS and the Nordic nRF platform. You bring expertise in BLE communication, low-power system design, and embedded architecture, and you have a structured, modular approach to building scalable systems.

You’re comfortable working close to the hardware—bringing up new boards, writing and optimizing device drivers, and ensuring smooth integration between hardware and software components. You take a system-level view, understanding how design decisions affect power consumption, performance, and maintainability.

In this role, you’ll work across the entire firmware lifecycle: from requirements and system architecture to implementation, testing, and optimization. You’ll collaborate closely with our R&D, data science, QA, and mobile teams to bring new sensing technologies, algorithms, and user experiences to life on our wearable devices.

Your development philosophy emphasizes clean code, modularity, maintainability, and thorough testing. You know how to leverage Zephyr’s capabilities (RTOS primitives, device tree configuration, and build system) to design scalable and testable firmware architectures. You’re proactive in debugging and comfortable using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and hardware debuggers to trace complex issues down to the root cause.

Job requirements

What You’ll Be Doing

As our new Senior Embedded Engineer, you’ll be at the core of designing and building the next generation of our NOWATCH firmware. You will:

• Contribute early to the system architecture and design of our next-generation embedded platform.
• Develop highly modular and maintainable firmware using the Zephyr RTOS.
• Implement efficient and reliable BLE communication between the watch and our mobile applications, ensuring optimal performance, stability, and power efficiency.
• Write and optimize device drivers for cutting-edge ICs based on datasheets, reference implementations, and custom hardware.
• Debug and validate our hardware using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG, and other low-level tools.
• Dive deep into low-power optimizations, ensuring our watches deliver exceptional battery life with high performance.
• Bring our hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and into the CI/CD pipeline for automated testing and validation.
• Collaborate with our data scientists to deploy algorithms, signal processing pipelines, and machine learning models directly on our devices.
• Work closely with R&D, QA, and mobile teams to ensure a seamless end-to-end experience from firmware to user interface.
• Implement production / factory testing setups and scripts to ensure a high level of quality control in our factory.

Every day will bring a mix of technical challenges, creative problem-solving, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, all while helping shape the future of wearable health technology.

What You Bring

We’re looking for someone who combines strong technical capability with curiosity, ownership, and a drive for quality. You bring:

• Proven experience in firmware development for wearables, IoT, or other compact consumer electronics with a focus on low-power systems.
• Strong experience with C, Zephyr RTOS, and Nordic nRF SoCs (nRF Connect SDK).
• Knowledge of Zephyr’s kernel services and working with threads, synchronization primitives, tasks, workqueues, and message queues.
• Extensive knowledge of Zephyr’s build system: CMake, KConfig, west and sysbuild - and how to bring it into CI/CD (docker).
• Deep understanding of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).
• Experience with hardware interfaces such as I²C, SPI, UART, and I²S.
• Experience with bootloaders (MCUBoot), image signing, DFU/OTA processes.
• Familiarity with digital signal processing (DSP) and machine learning deployment on embedded systems.
• Ability to read and interpret datasheets, schematics, and PCB documentation.
• Strong debugging and profiling skills using JTAG, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other diagnostic tools.

Nice To Have’s

These skills aren’t required, but they’d make you stand out:

• Experience with Rust in embedded contexts (C/Rust interop, FFI, cbindgen, corrosion, no_std, async, embassy) or modern C++.
• Experience with Python for scripting, testing, and tooling.
• Experience with TinyML / TensorFlow Lite for inference on the edge.
• Basic knowledge of electrical engineering for schematic review, and/or PCB design review.

Mindset

Above all, we value a mindset that aligns with our mission.

• Entrepreneurial spirit with a “founder’s mindset” – authentic, proactive, resourceful, and ownership-oriented.
• Comfort with ambiguity and an ability to pivot strategies as needed.
• Passion for health technology and excitement to contribute to a mission-driven startup.

Why NOWATCH?

When you join our team, you’re not just taking a job—you’re embarking on a journey with like-minded individuals who care deeply about:

• Collaboration: We thrive together in our Amsterdam office.
• Growth: Opportunities to learn, evolve, and challenge yourself.
• Impact: Contributing to something bigger than ourselves.
• Diversity: Be part of a young and ambitious team of internationals.

What We Offer

At NOWATCH, we believe in supporting our team with:

• A laptop and NOWATCH of choice.
• A great office in the heart of the Jordaan, Amsterdam, with the ability to partly work from home.
• Great team, culture and place to work with quarterly team events.

The Team

We are a small team of very enthusiastic, hard-working people. We go at the speed of trust and make our own rules to create the best possible environment for our team. You'll definitely fit in if you have a hands-on and pro-active approach, think outside your own department, and want to join our movement in helping people get more from each moment in life.

Let’s build something extraordinary together.