Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer - Real-Time C++ for Drones

Speedrun Talent Network; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Bonuses

Job summary

Zipline is hiring for a role focused on owning C++ firmware for a distributed fleet of aircraft microcontrollers. You will work with embedded Linux and microcontrollers, turning hardware behavior and flight data into reliable software for scalable deployments.

Expect collaboration with electrical, mechanical, and systems engineers to deliver observable, testable firmware for field operations. The role emphasizes real-time optimization, robust interfaces, and tooling work in Rust for simulations

Qualifications

• Experience writing C++ for embedded or resource-constrained systems.
• Experience with Ethernet, serial interfaces, or other hardware communication protocols.
• Experience designing and debugging real-time firmware, including task scheduling, interrupts, concurrency, synchronization, and memory constraints.
• Experience deploying embedded systems with safety and reliability requirements.

Responsibilities

• Design and build C++ firmware for a distributed network of aircraft microcontrollers.
• Develop Ethernet, serial, and other MCU communication interfaces.
• Define platform interfaces and reusable firmware components for multiple subsystems.
• Own performance of MCU systems and communication buses across startup, RT operation, fault handling, and recovery.
• Optimize real-time behavior: CPU, memory, scheduling latency, timing jitter, resource contention.
• Develop metrics, monitoring and troubleshooting for field deployment at scale.
• Develop Rust-based tooling and SIL simulations to test firmware behavior.

Skills

C++ firmware

Embedded systems

Real-time firmware

Debugging

Peripheral drivers

Communication interfaces

Rust tooling

Tools

SIL simulations

Job description

Zipline is hiring for a role focused on owning C++ firmware for a distributed fleet of aircraft microcontrollers. You will work with embedded Linux and microcontrollers, turning hardware behavior and flight data into reliable software for scalable deployments.

Expect collaboration with electrical, mechanical, and systems engineers to deliver observable, testable firmware for field operations. The role emphasizes real-time optimization, robust interfaces, and tooling work in Rust for simulations