Senior Firmware Engineer, Platform
Who we are
Neros is a defense technology company rebuilding America’s drone industrial base. We design and manufacture high-performance unmanned systems that are tested in combat, iterated at startup speed, and built at massive scale. Our team culture is fast, hands-on, and obsessed with closing the gap between design and deployment.
As drones transform the character of warfare, Neros is delivering the systems the West needs to compete on the modern battlefield and deter the adversaries of democracy. We’re hiring engineers, operators, and builders who want to move fast, take on extreme ownership, and get capability into the hands of warfighters in months, not years.
What you will be doing
Neros builds first-person-view drones for the modern battlefield. As a Senior Firmware Engineer on the Platform team, you will own the common runtime, libraries, SDK, and build system that our flight, ground-station, and autonomy software teams build on - across microcontroller and Linux targets alike. Your customers are other engineers, and the hardest problems in this space are the ones that surface where their code meets the platform.
Responsibilities
- Own the common runtime and libraries every firmware team consumes - logging, telemetry, IPC, configuration - on MCU-based systems and Linux targets
- Own the build system and cross-compile toolchain: fast, reproducible, hermetic builds across every target we ship, and the SDK other teams consume
- Design and maintain the interfaces other teams build on, keeping them stable as the platform evolves underneath
- Solve the hard, ambiguous problems that surface where the platform meets its consumer teams
- Drive resource trade-offs - compute, memory, bandwidth - when subsystems compete for the same budget
- Raise the firmware engineering bar through patterns, code review, and mentoring
You should have the following
- Mastery of embedded C on shipped products, with fluency across both MCU/RTOS and embedded Linux environments
- Have built platform code that other engineers depended on - libraries, SDKs, or protocols consumed by multiple teams - and kept them stable through change
- Hands-on ownership of an embedded build system (e.g. Bazel) - cross-compilation across multiple targets, dependency management, and build reproducibility
- Track record of owning problems that spanned team or subsystem boundaries and driving them to shipped resolution
- Strong resource-constrained design judgment - compute, memory, and bandwidth trade-offs on real hardware
- Debugging mastery - a history of cracking the bugs others gave up on
- Hands-on: you still ship code, and your technical influence comes from the work
Nice to have
- Bazel specifically, especially for embedded/cross-compiled targets - or migrating a firmware org onto it
- Embedded Linux platform internals - kernel, BSPs, Yocto/Buildroot - alongside MCU work
- Flight-stack experience - Betaflight, PX4, or similar
- DSP, comms, or RF-adjacent firmware
- Visible open-source systems work
- You fly - FPV, RC, or drones generally
US Salary Range
$195,000 - $273,000 USD
The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary may vary based on (but not limited to) work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Highly competitive equity grants are considered part of Neros' total compensation package.
We’re an equal opportunity employer. We welcome all applicants without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.