Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer – Real-Time Flight Systems

Socket.dev; South San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline is hiring for an embedded software role in South San Francisco, CA, focusing on C++ firmware for a distributed drone system. You will own MCU firmware, develop robust communication interfaces, and build platform-level components to support multiple subsystems, all while ensuring predictable real-time performance and reliability.

Work includes collaboration with electrical, mechanical, and systems teams, plus Rust-based tooling and simulations to validate firmware behavior.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills and production experience writing C++ for embedded or resource-constrained systems.
• Experience with embedded communications, such as 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 building and maintaining real-world deployed embedded systems, and handling the long tail of edge cases to ensure consistent safety, reliability, and high performance
• A systems mindset and intuition for debugging; when anything could be wrong, you know how to narrow down the possibilities.
• Fluency in implementing peripheral drivers based on electrical schematics and datasheets, and debugging at this boundary in order to support prototype hardware evaluation
• Our team uses a hybrid in-office and distributed work environment, centered around our headquarters in South San Francisco, CA. You must be able to work from the office on a regular basis.

Responsibilities

• Design and build C++ firmware for a distributed system of aircraft microcontrollers.
• Develop reliable Ethernet, serial, and other microcontroller communication interfaces.
• Define platform-level interfaces and reusable firmware components that support multiple aircraft subsystems.
• Own the predictable and reliable performance of our microcontroller systems and the communication buses that connect them, across startup, real-time operation, fault handling, and recovery.
• Optimize real-time behavior, including CPU utilization, memory usage, scheduling latency, timing jitter, and resource contention
• Develop metrics, monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities to prepare the system for field deployment at scale
• Develop Rust-based tooling and software-in-the-loop simulations to test and validate firmware behavior.

Skills

C++ embedded

Real-time firmware

Embedded communications

Driver development

Debugging and diagnostics

Systems mindset

Peripheral drivers

Tools

Rust

Job description

Zipline is hiring for an embedded software role in South San Francisco, CA, focusing on C++ firmware for a distributed drone system. You will own MCU firmware, develop robust communication interfaces, and build platform-level components to support multiple subsystems, all while ensuring predictable real-time performance and reliability.

Work includes collaboration with electrical, mechanical, and systems teams, plus Rust-based tooling and simulations to validate firmware behavior.