Senior Firmware Engineer, Connected Oven IoT

Tovala; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Tovala, a food-tech company, seeks a Senior Firmware Engineer to elevate our connected oven firmware across legacy Electric Imp/Squirrel and new ESP32 platforms. You will own end-to-end development, testing pipelines, and fleet deployment while applying AI tooling judiciously in embedded contexts.

You'll collaborate with hardware, thermal, QA, manufacturing, and backend teams and contribute to evolving our firmware development practices on a hybrid basis in the Chicago area.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional firmware or embedded software engineering.
• Experience shipping firmware to internet-connected devices in production.
• Strong fundamentals in C/C++ and embedded systems (RTOS, memory, timing).
• Experience with Python and build/testing tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, test, and ship firmware for connected ovens (Electric Imp Squirrel fleet; ESP32 platform).
• Own bug fixes, features, and performance improvements end-to-end from scoping to production monitoring.
• Write, monitor, and maintain automated firmware test pipelines.
• Design and execute test plans on bench and fleet subsets (tens of thousands of ovens).
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools while applying judgement for embedded contexts.
• Collaborate with mechanical, thermal, quality, and backend teams to root-cause cross-stack issues.

Skills

C/C++

Embedded systems

Python

Squirrel

ESP32

I2C SPI UART

BLE Wi-Fi TLS MQTT

CI/CD GitHub Actions

AI-assisted development

Communication

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering / Electrical Engineering

Tools

ESP-IDF

FreeRTOS

Electric Imp / Squirrel

GitHub Actions

Job description

Tovala, a food-tech company, seeks a Senior Firmware Engineer to elevate our connected oven firmware across legacy Electric Imp/Squirrel and new ESP32 platforms. You will own end-to-end development, testing pipelines, and fleet deployment while applying AI tooling judiciously in embedded contexts.

You'll collaborate with hardware, thermal, QA, manufacturing, and backend teams and contribute to evolving our firmware development practices on a hybrid basis in the Chicago area.