Senior Real-Time Embedded Firmware Engineer (Drones)

Telemetry Today LLC; South San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Discretionary bonuses

Paid time off

Medical, dental and vision insurance

Job summary

Zipline, the world’s leading drone logistics company, seeks a firmware-focused software engineer to own C++ firmware for a distributed fleet of aircraft microcontrollers. You will collaborate with embedded Linux, electrical, mechanical, and systems engineers to translate hardware behavior and flight data into reliable software for deployed aircraft.

You will develop robust interfaces, observability, and tooling to ensure safety, reliability, and high performance across field deployments, in a

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering experience writing C++ for embedded or resource-constrained systems.
• Experience with embedded communications (Ethernet, serial).
• Experience designing and debugging real-time firmware, including scheduling, interrupts, and memory constraints.
• Experience building and maintaining deployed embedded systems with edge-case handling for safety and reliability.

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 for multiple subsystems.
• Own the predictable and reliable performance of microcontroller systems and buses across startup, RT operation, fault handling, and recovery.
• Optimize real-time behavior: CPU usage, memory, scheduling latency, timing jitter, resource contention.
• Develop metrics, monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities for field deployment at scale.
• Develop Rust-based tooling and software-in-the-loop simulations to test and validate firmware behavior.

Skills

C++

Embedded systems

Real-time firmware

Debugging

Peripheral drivers

Rust tooling

Job description

Zipline, the world’s leading drone logistics company, seeks a firmware-focused software engineer to own C++ firmware for a distributed fleet of aircraft microcontrollers. You will collaborate with embedded Linux, electrical, mechanical, and systems engineers to translate hardware behavior and flight data into reliable software for deployed aircraft.

You will develop robust interfaces, observability, and tooling to ensure safety, reliability, and high performance across field deployments, in a