Senior Firmware Engineer, Robotics

Job details

Work model

On-site

Salary

$100K - $300K per year

Location

Fremont Office

Hiring context

How this role compares at Dexmate

Dexmate has 39 live roles in MeritLog’s catalog across 10 job families, and 24 of them are in engineering. 31 of those listings publish a pay range, a disclosure rate of 79%.

Counted across the job boards MeritLog tracks, at the time this page was served. Pay comparisons use only listings that publish a complete range in the same currency and period.

Job description

Dexmate is building the foundation for physical AI - a unified platform that combines high-quality robotic hardware with a universal Physical AI OS, making robots as easy to build and deploy as software. Today, robotics is fragmented, slow, and closed: most builders are forced to reinvent the same stack again and again, and most ideas never make it past the prototype stage. We exist to change that. Our mission is to democratize robotics by lowering the barrier to entry, delivering a plug-and-play platform for developers, researchers, and enterprises, and cultivating an open ecosystem that accelerates the evolution of physical AI. If you want to help shape the next layer of human capability - and believe the future of robotics should be built together, not in isolation - we'd love to build it with you. THE ROLE We’re looking for a Senior Firmware Engineer to own the low-level firmware stack powering our general-purpose robots. You will architect, implement, test, and release production firmware for actuator controllers, sensing systems, power electronics, and real-time communication devices. This is a highly hands-on role spanning the complete firmware lifecycle - from MCU selection, board bring-up, BSP and driver development to real-time control, system diagnostics, validation, and production deployment. You will work closely with electrical, mechanical, controls, and higher-level software engineers to define clean interfaces between hardware and the broader robotics software stack. Your firmware will be among the first code running on every new robot subsystem, and you will help establish the architecture and engineering practices required to scale our robots from rapidly evolving prototypes to reliable deployed systems. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Architecting and developing production-grade firmware for actuator controllers, sensor interfaces, power systems, and communication devices - Owning firmware architecture across bootloaders, BSPs, hardware abstraction layers, RTOS services, device drivers, diagnostics, and firmware update mechanisms - Bringing up and validating new PCBs, including peripheral initialization, clock and memory configuration, interrupt handling, DMA, and low-level hardware interfaces - Implementing deterministic, real-time firmware on bare-metal and RTOS platforms, with careful consideration of timing, concurrency, memory, compute, and power constraints - Developing and optimizing motor-control firmware, including current, torque, velocity, and position control loops, encoder interfaces, PWM generation, and fault handling - Implementing and maintaining real-time communication stacks, including EtherCAT, CAN/CAN FD, SPI, I2C, and UART - Designing firmware safety and reliability mechanisms, including fault detection, watchdogs, recovery paths, safe-state behavior, and graceful degradation - Building observability and field-diagnostic capabilities that make firmware behavior measurable, traceable, and debuggable - Developing automated unit, integration, hardware-in-the-loop, stress, and fault-injection testing for embedded systems - Building and maintaining firmware CI/CD, validation, versioning, and release processes - Supporting manufacturing, calibration, end-of-line testing, and production troubleshooting as systems move from prototype to deployment - Reading schematics, PCB layouts, and component datasheets and contributing firmware input during electrical and system design reviews - Debugging complex interactions across firmware, electronics, controls, and higher-level robotics software - Establishing firmware coding standards, architecture guidelines, documentation, and code-review practices as the team scales WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - 5+ years of professional embedded firmware development experience in robotics, automotive, industrial automation, or complex consumer electronics, including experience shipping production-deployed products - Strong C and C++ programming skills in resource-constrained bare-metal and RTOS environments - Deep understanding of embedded systems fundamentals, including interrupts, DMA, timers, scheduling, concurrency, memory layout, boot sequences, and real-time behavior - Experience developing firmware across multiple modern MCU families, such as ARM Cortex-M, TI C2000, STM32, or Nordic nRF; breadth across vendors and architectures is valued over specialization in a single platform - Hands-on experience developing motor-control or actuator firmware, including FOC, current or torque control, velocity control, position control, or similar real-time control systems - Driver-level experience with embedded communication protocols, including EtherCAT, CAN/CAN FD, SPI, I2C, and UART - Demonstrated experience with board bring-up, peripheral-driver development, and debugging across the firmware and hardware boundary - Proficiency with embedded debugging and laboratory tools, including JTAG/SWD debuggers, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and protocol analyzers - Ability to read and interpret schematics, PCB layouts, component datasheets, and timing diagrams - Experience developing reliable, testable, and maintainable firmware using modern version control, code review, automated testing, and continuous integration practices - Strong cross-functional communication skills and comfort working directly with electrical, controls, mechanical, and software engineers PREFERRED - Experience scaling firmware from early prototypes to production across hundreds or thousands of deployed units - Experience developing bootloaders, secure firmware update systems, rollback mechanisms, and field-diagnostic tooling - Familiarity with functional safety or embedded security standards such as ISO 26262, IEC 61508, ISO 13849, or IEC 62443 - Python experience for firmware tooling, test automation, manufacturing tests, and HIL frameworks - Experience implementing or integrating EtherCAT master or slave stacks, such as SOEM or equivalent - Experience with power-electronics firmware, including battery-management systems, motor inverters, DC-DC converters, or charging systems - Experience with firmware profiling and optimization across timing, memory, compute, and power constraints - Prior experience working in a vertically integrated robotics or hardware startup - Hands-on use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex to accelerate implementation, test generation, debugging, documentation, and firmware-development workflows