Embedded Engineer - Scientific Robotics & Automation

Location: Flexible / Hybrid (in-office required for hardware testing; remote otherwise)

Type: Full-Time

About the Company

We're an early-stage startup building automation and robotics for high-precision scientific instrumentation. Our product eliminates a manual, error-prone process in life sciences research that currently requires years of specialist training - replacing it with a reliable, automated system that accelerates scientific discovery.

We're a small, focused team backed by a well-established parent company and fully funded with clear runway. This is a ground-floor opportunity to own meaningful work on real hardware from day one.

The Role

We're looking for an Embedded Engineer to join our software team and take direct ownership of firmware, control systems, and hardware-software integration on our core product. You'll work closely with our existing software engineer and have immediate impact on the things that matter most: making the machine better.

This is not a maintenance role. You'll be working on novel actuation mechanisms, vision-based detection systems, thermal control optimization, and firmware infrastructure - the kind of problems that require both depth and curiosity.

What You'll Work On

• Cooler and thermal system optimization via embedded control algorithms
• GUI improvements on our Raspberry Pi-based interface
• Firmware update mechanism design and implementation
• New railgun actuator development and integration
• Vision-based grid detection for automated sample positioning
• Ongoing sensor fusion, diagnostics, and system reliability improvements

What We're Looking For

Must-haves:

• Proficiency in C++ and Python
• Experience with FreeRTOS or equivalent bare-metal RTOS (QNX, Zephyr, etc.)
• Mechatronics and robotics systems background
• Control system implementation: PIDs, state machines, speed controllers
• Low-level communications: I2C, SPI, serial, CAN bus, Ethernet, MQTT
• Sensor handling and Kalman filtering / sensor fusion
• Firmware update implementation experience

Nice to haves:

• Camera management and video handling
• Computer vision and feature detection
• Machine learning or signal analysis
• Predictive diagnostics
• Data analysis and sensor readout interpretation

We're industry-agnostic.

Strong candidates from oil & gas, healthcare, telecom, defence, or industrial automation are equally welcome — what matters is your technical depth and your ability to own problems independently.

Who You Are

• You're comfortable working autonomously on hard technical problems and know when to ask for help
• You thrive in early-stage environments where the roadmap isn't fully defined
• You want to see your code running on physical hardware, not just passing tests in CI
• You care about the quality and reliability of what you ship
• You're interested in contributing to team culture, not just the codebase

Compensation

• Base salary up to $150k (commensurate with experience)
• Stock grant with 4-year vesting and 1-year cliff
• Performance-based bonus
• Benefits package