Senior Embedded Software Engineer - Real-Time Robotics

GRAM; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 165,000 - 205,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation bonus

On-site in Palo Alto

Job summary

GRAM is seeking an embedded software engineer to own software from microcontrollers through the Linux robot runtime. You will bring up new electronics, build drivers, deterministic communications, timing, health monitoring, calibration, logging, and fault response, exposing stable interfaces to autonomy.

Success means versioned embedded software that behaves on known hardware, remains observable under degraded conditions, and supports automated testing and releases.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS/CE or equivalent practical experience.
• Shipped C/C++ software on a custom electromechanical product using an RTOS, embedded Linux, or both.
• Implemented and debugged device drivers, interrupts, DMA, concurrency, and interfaces such as CAN, EtherCAT, Ethernet, SPI, I2C, or UART.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement C and C++ firmware, device drivers, hardware abstraction, real-time services, communication protocols, and robot-runtime components.
• Define timing, bandwidth, lifecycle, state-machine, calibration, diagnostic, and fault-response contracts across sensors, actuators, power electronics, compute, and autonomy.
• Bring up new boards and embedded compute using debuggers, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, bus analyzers, kernel traces, and structured telemetry.
• Build boot, provisioning, parameter, configuration, software-update, rollback, and recovery paths with explicit failure behavior and version compatibility.
• Develop simulation, software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, fault-injection, and regression tests that run automatically and gate releases.
• Measure and improve latency, jitter, resource use, startup time, communication reliability, logging completeness, and recovery under load.
• Investigate integrated-machine failures across firmware, Linux, networking, electronics, controls, and autonomy, then carry corrections through reproducible tests and release evidence.

Skills

C/C++ programming

real-time systems

embedded software

hardware bring-up

fault diagnosis

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/CE or equivalent practical experience

Tools

RTOS

embedded Linux

CAN

EtherCAT

Ethernet

SPI

I2C

UART

Job description

GRAM is seeking an embedded software engineer to own software from microcontrollers through the Linux robot runtime. You will bring up new electronics, build drivers, deterministic communications, timing, health monitoring, calibration, logging, and fault response, exposing stable interfaces to autonomy.

Success means versioned embedded software that behaves on known hardware, remains observable under degraded conditions, and supports automated testing and releases.