Audio Firmware Engineer
About Hark
Hark is an artificial intelligence company building advanced, personalized intelligence. One that is proactive, multimodal, and capable of interacting with the world through speech, text, vision, and persistent memory.
We're pairing that intelligence with next-generation hardware to create a universal interface between humans and machines. While today's AI largely operates through chat boxes and decade-old devices, Hark is focused on what comes next: agentic systems that interact naturally with people and the real world.
To get there, we're developing multimodal models and next-generation AI hardware together - designed from the ground up as a single, unified interface for a new era of intelligent systems.
About the Role
We’re looking for an experienced Audio Firmware Engineer to develop and optimize next-generation embedded audio solutions on Android and SoC platforms. This role spans audio system bring-up, DSP pipeline integration, firmware optimization, and deployment of advanced audio/AI features for consumer devices. You will work across the software stack-from Android audio framework and HAL layers down to DSP-bringing production-quality audio experiences to market. This is hands-on work close to silicon, with direct impact on how every user experiences the product.
Responsibilities
- Bring up audio on new hardware in the Android system - codecs, mics, speakers, routing, and low-level platform integration
- Design, implement, and manage audio use cases on SoC platforms across playback, capture, voice, and always-on listening paths
- Integrate and tune audio paths across the Android audio stack (HAL, AudioFlinger, Audio Policy Manager, TinyALSA/ALSA) and the underlying SoC audio frameworks
- Debug complex audio issues end-to-end using platform logs, working from kernel and DSP traces up through application-level symptoms
- Partner with the AI team to support audio-driven inference workloads (wake word, ASR, speech enhancement) within latency, power, and memory budgets
- Collaborate with hardware, acoustics, and product teams from prototype through production to ship audio that feels effortless to users
Requirements
- 3+ years of professional firmware or embedded audio development, ideally on consumer products that have shipped at scale
- Proficient with C/C++ in resource-constrained, real-time environments
- Familiar with Android audio architecture: Audio HAL, AudioFlinger, Audio Policy Manager, and TinyALSA/ALSA interfaces
- Hands-on experience with audio tooling and frameworks
- Comfort working across the full audio stack - kernel drivers, DSP firmware, HAL, framework - and debugging issues that span all of it
- Experience working alongside hardware engineers during board bring-up and reading schematics for audio subsystems
Bonus Qualifications
- Working knowledge of audio processing algorithms - dynamic range control, echo cancellation, noise suppression, beamforming, and similar
- DSP optimization experience, including fixed-point development, SIMD and VLIW.
- Tune audio quality and validate behavior across acoustic conditions
- Experience deploying machine learning models on embedded platforms, especially audio models running on DSP or NPU
- Background shipping voice-first or far-field audio products
Compensation
The US base salary range for this full-time position is between $120,000 - $300,000 annually.
The pay offered for this position may vary based on several individual factors, including job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package may also include additional components/benefits depending on the specific role. This information will be shared if an employment offer is extended.