Embedded Software Engineer

Swoop Technologies; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 130,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Swoop Technologies in Washington, DC — or Minneapolis — is seeking an experienced embedded systems engineer to develop and maintain OS-critical firmware and kernel modules. You will craft bootloaders, device drivers, and services, enabling robust initialization and hardware interaction.

You will collaborate across teams to debug complex issues spanning firmware, OS, and application layers, and you may travel up to 20% to meet customer requirements and deployment needs.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering or related technical field, or equivalent technical experience
• 4+ years of experience in Operating System/Kernel development, RTOS, Embedded Systems/Firmware design, Microkernel development, Bare Metal development
• Software development experience in C and Rust
• Understanding of low level hardware systems
• Travel Requirement - 5-20%
• Active US Security clearance or ability and willingness to be sponsored for a US Security clearance

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain embedded system firmware including low-level drivers, bootloaders, and other OS-critical functions to enable reliable OS initialization and hardware interaction
• Contribute to OS integration and kernel-level modules, ensuring efficient communication between hardware abstraction layers and higher-level system software
• Design and implement application-layer features and system services that leverage firmware interfaces, optimizing for performance, resource use, and robustness
• Collaborate cross-functionally with other engineering teams to debug complex issues spanning firmware, operating system, and application boundaries
• Collaborate closely with the deployment engineering team, solving technical challenges for various customer requirements

Skills

C programming

Rust programming

Low-level hardware understanding

Travel willingness

US security clearance eligible

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Engineering or related field

Tools

Embedded systems

RTOS

Bare metal development

Device drivers

Job description

Impact:

Joining our Edge Team means you will get to work on building an operating system. Not an abstraction, virtualization, or data layer. A legitimate distributed operating system. This OS has to work across heterogeneous instruction sets, support a new generation of distributed system abstractions, treat security as a first principle, and work at the scale of power grids and entire militaries. You will influence the intersection of artificial intelligence, robotics, and the physical world - building a compute model the OS schedules and executes across the most geopolitically relevant problem sets. It is a bad-ass problem where every member of the team contributes tangibly on a daily basis. Come join us in either our Minneapolis or Washington, DC offices.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and maintain embedded system firmware including low-level drivers, bootloaders, and other OS-critical functions to enable reliable OS initialization and hardware interaction.
• Contribute to OS integration and kernel-level modules, ensuring efficient communication between hardware abstraction layers and higher-level system software.
• Design and implement application-layer features and system services that leverage firmware interfaces, optimizing for performance, resource use, and robustness.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with other engineering teams to debug complex issues spanning firmware, operating system, and application boundaries.
• Collaborate closely with the deployment engineering team, solving technical challenges for various customer requirements

You Should Have:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering or related technical field, or equivalent technical experience
• 4+ years of experience in one or more of the following: Operating System/Kernel development, RTOS, Embedded Systems/Firmware design, Microkernel development, Bare Metal development
• Software development experience in C and Rust
• Understanding of low level hardware systems
• Travel Requirement - 5-20%
• Active US Security clearance or ability and willingness to be sponsored for a US Security clearance

Bonus if you have:

• Knowledge of one or more of the following: Microcontrollers, SoC, device drivers, hardware bring-up, power management, ARM processors, performance optimization, file systems, bootloading, firmware, x86 assembly, system BIOS, FPGAs or hardware/software integration
• Understanding of clocks and timing as it pertains to processor instructions
• Familiarity with serial protocols such as I2C, SPI, UART, USB
• Demonstrated knowledge of systems engineering and distributed systems

Swoop Technologies is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, gender identity or any other factor protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws.