Embedded Software Engineering - espace

Polluxa, Inc.; Arlington (TX); On-site; USD 25,000 - 34,000; Part time

Job summary

Polluxa, Inc. is seeking an Embedded Software Engineering Intern to develop real firmware for a sensor-rich, wireless IoT device. You’ll work on Arm Cortex-M MCUs using Zephyr RTOS, bringing up sensors, and moving data from edge to cloud with guidance from a senior engineer.

You’ll have your own board and debugger, ship at least one feature end-to-end, and pair daily with a mentor to review code, at the bench and at the whiteboard.

Qualifications

• Write and debug firmware in C on Zephyr RTOS for Arm Cortex-M class MCUs.
• Work on sensor integration and sampling pipelines — IMUs, accelerometers, microphones, temperature sensors — over I2C, SPI, and I2S.
• Build, flash, and debug boards daily using West, CMake , SWD/J-Link, and serial consoles.
• Contribute to edge-to-cloud connectivity: Wi-Fi, MQTT over TLS, and low-power wireless protocols such as Thread and BLE.
• Help collect and validate sensor datasets that feed on-device machine learning models, and assist with deploying and evaluating those models on target hardware.

Responsibilities

• Write unit and integration tests alongside your feature code — we test what we ship.
• Build and improve bench tooling: flash/serial automation scripts, data-capture harnesses, and hardware-in-the-loop test setups.
• Reproduce, instrument, and root-cause bugs on real hardware, and document what you find so the next engineer doesn't hit it twice.
• Participate in design discussions and code reviews — your code gets reviewed, and you review ours.
• Work directly with hardware and systems engineers when the bug turns out not to be in software.
• Present your work at the end of the internship: what you built, what you learned, and what you'd do differently.

Skills

Embedded C

Zephyr RTOS

Arm Cortex-M

Sensor integration

Debugging

Unit tests

Edge-to-cloud

Tools

West

CMake

SWD/J-Link

Serial consoles

Job description

Ready to make connectivity from space universally accessible, secure and actionable? Then you’ve come to the right place!

E-Space is bridging Earth and space to enable hyper-scaled deployments of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions and services. We are building a highly-advanced low Earth orbit (LEO) space system that will fundamentally change the design, economics, manufacturing and service delivery associated with traditional satellite and terrestrial IoT systems.

We’re intentional, we’re unapologetically curious and we’re 100% committed to innovate space-based communications and deliver actionable intelligence that will expand global economies, protect space and our planet and enhance our overall quality of life.

About the Role

We are looking for an Embedded Software Engineering Intern to work on real firmware for real hardware that ships. You will be embedded (pun intended) with a senior firmware engineer working on a sensor-rich, wireless-connected IoT device: writing production C on Zephyr RTOS, bringing up sensors, debugging on live boards at the bench, and moving data from the edge to the cloud.

This is not a shadow-and-observe internship. You will have your own board, your own debugger, and your own work items from week one. You will pair daily with your mentor — at the whiteboard, at the bench, and in code review — and by the end of the internship you will have shipped at least one feature end-to-end on live hardware.

What you will do:

Hands-on Development

Write and debug firmware in C on Zephyr RTOS for Arm Cortex-M class MCUs.

Work on sensor integration and sampling pipelines — IMUs, accelerometers, microphones, temperature sensors — over I2C, SPI, and I2S.

Build, flash, and debug boards daily using West, CMake , SWD/J-Link, and serial consoles.

Contribute to edge-to-cloud connectivity: Wi-Fi, MQTT over TLS, and low-power wireless protocols such as Thread and BLE.

Help collect and validate sensor datasets that feed on-device machine learning models, and assist with deploying and evaluating those models on target hardware.

Test and Tooling

Write unit and integration tests alongside your feature code — we test what we ship.

Build and improve bench tooling: flash/serial automation scripts, data-capture harnesses, and hardware-in-the-loop test setups.

Reproduce, instrument, and root-cause bugs on real hardware, and document what you find so the next engineer doesn't hit it twice.

Team Collaboration

Participate in design discussions and code reviews — your code gets reviewed, and you review ours.

Work directly with hardware and systems engineers when the bug turns out not to be in software.

Present your work at the end of the internship: what you built, what you learned, and what you'd do differently.

What we are looking for:

Required