What are the responsibilities and job description for the Sr. to Staff Firmware / Embedded Software Engineer - Delivery Drones position at Skyrocket Ventures?
Sr. to Staff Firmware / Embedded Software Engineer - Delivery Drones
San Francisco, CA (you can work from home up to 2x/week)
The team builds small, lightweight autonomous delivery drones with safety-first hardware designed to operate around people and everyday urban infrastructure. The work has a positive impact on the sustainability, access, and cost of everyday necessities.
You would be joining an elite group of about 60 people and 20 engineers inside a much larger public company. This org operates as a small, fast-moving hardware innovation lab: minimal bureaucracy, real build/test cycles, and ownership of systems that ship and operate at a very large scale.
The company has a compensation range based on experience, with salary of $180k-$340k, plus RSUs translating into total first year compensation of $300k-800k.
Job Responsibilities:
- Leading the development and bring-up of ARM-based microcontroller platforms across our robotics products. This is a high-ownership role, directly responsible for building the low-level firmware that powers our platforms
- Designing, implementing, and validating firmware for motion control, sensor integration, communications, power management, and safety-critical functionality.
- This role comes with a strong expectation of hands-on board bring-up, low-level debugging, and cross-disciplinary collaboration with electrical and systems engineers.
- Owning the firmware bring-up and integration for new embedded platforms (e.g. ARM Cortex-M series).
- Developing and maintaining bare-metal firmware and RTOS-based applications for robotic subsystems (motor control, sensors, telemetry, power systems).
- Writing and maintaining robust, maintainable, and well-documented C/C code for embedded targets.
- Collaborating with the electrical engineering team on hardware bring-up, schematic review, and system integration.
- Leading system bringup, validation, and debug
- Contributing to firmware safety, reliability, and system-level robustness.
Qualifications:
- A Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or similar.
- At least 5 (preferably more) years of hands-on experience in embedded systems development.
- Deep expertise in bare-metal programming on ARM microcontrollers.
- Expertise with C, and proficiency with C for embedded targets and firmware design patterns.
- Experience with hardware bring-up and low-level debugging on custom boards.
- Understanding of digital electronics, buses (I2C, SPI, UART, CAN), and embedded peripherals.
- Strong system-level thinking, with an ability to work independently and take ownership across the full development cycle.
Nice to have:
- Experience with RTOS (e.g., FreeRTOS, Zephyr) or Embedded Linux on constrained systems.
- Familiarity with motor control, power systems, or battery management in robotics or automotive contexts.
- Experience working closely with hardware teams, reading schematics, and performing board-level debug.
- Familiarity with safety-critical systems, watchdogs, and fault handling.
- Comfortable working in fast-paced, high-ownership engineering environments like those found in startups or advanced R&D teams.
About Skyrocket Ventures
Skyrocket Ventures is a recruiting firm for hundreds of high growth technology companies that range from industry leaders to top-tier startups. This opportunity is with one of our client companies for a full-time permanent hire. Please only apply if you are authorized to work in the U.S.
Please note that even if this job is not a perfect match, we encourage you to apply as long as it is in the ballpark. Companies are often flexible in hiring candidates who do not perfectly fit their written job description, as long as the most important qualifications are there and the candidate is good in general.
Most of the jobs we are recruiting for are not posted online, so if you would like to know of all the opportunities we have that match your interests and qualifications, then please get in touch with us.
After you apply to this job posting, we’ll consider you for this job as well as any other potential matches with our client companies. If we have any potential matches, we’ll share your resume with those companies and contact you about any interview opportunities we can get you.
Thank you, and we wish you a great job search!
Salary : $180,000 - $340,000