{"id":1399801,"url":"https://alion.io/job/queue-seniorstaff-firmware-engineer","title":"Senior/Staff Firmware Engineer","company":{"id":3787073,"name":"Queue","domain":"queue.inc","url":"https://alion.io/company/queue-3","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Hardware","role_family":"Hardware","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Newark, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":138000,"max_usd":253000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":324},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"Protobuf","optional":false},{"name":"RTOS","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":true},{"name":"Motion Planning","optional":true},{"name":"Sensor Fusion","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-10T20:08:19Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-10","last_verified_at":"2026-10-01T09:02:26Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":112,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":112},"description":"About Us\nWe're Queue, the world's first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy. We go from sealed wholesale bottles to filled, verified prescription vials with zero human involvement.\nWe built Queue because no one should ever have to wait in line for the medicines they need. One in three US pharmacies has shut down. Pharmacists are overworked to a breaking point. And patients are paying the price. Queue fixes that. Pharmacists get to practice pharmacy again - counseling patients, catching interactions, doing the work only they can do. And patients get their prescriptions in 60 seconds or less, any time, anywhere.\nWe're backed by over $18 million from Alleycorp, Riot Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, House Capital, and others who believe the pharmacy system is broken and that robotics can fix it. Queue was founded by Nick Desai (6x founder, previously CEO of Heal) and Joshua Liu (previously Tesla, Waymo, and Zipline).\nWe build physical robots that handle Schedule II narcotics. Patient safety is non-negotiable, and it starts in the firmware.\nAbout the Role\nYou own the firmware that physically moves the medication. This is the bare-metal / RTOS software on the motor-control microcontroller inside the robot - the layer below the edge agent, where a command becomes motion, a sensor becomes a decision, and a safety interlock is the difference between the right dose and a patient-safety event.\nYou own the firmware side of the PreScript interface - the wire protocol the edge agent (Rust, on Jetson-class hardware) uses to drive the dispense mechanism - and everything below it: motor control loops, sensor acquisition and cross-checking, timing-critical actuation, and the on-device safety gates that make an unsafe dispense structurally impossible rather than merely unlikely.\nThis posting covers Senior and Staff levels. Which one you land at is set by scope and impact - a Senior engineer owns hard subsystems end-to-end; a Staff engineer's work changes how the whole team operates. You work directly with Josh (CTO) on the motor-control and hardware interface, and report to the Head of Software Engineering on architecture and cross-boundary integration with the edge agent.\nWhat You'll Own\nMotor control - Closed-loop actuation of the dispensing mechanism: PWM/DMA drive, current sensing, stall detection, and the timing budgets that keep motion precise and safe.\n\nThe PreScript firmware interface - The firmware side of the wire protocol with the edge agent. You own the contract, the framing, and the failure behavior when the link drops mid-dispense.\n\nSensor acquisition & cross-check - Read, filter, and independently cross-check the signals that confirm a dispense happened correctly. No critical signal is trusted on a single source.\n\nOn-firmware safety - Interlocks and state machines that fail closed: the code path to actuate does not exist without confirmed, verified state. Watchdogs, brown-out behavior, safe-state on fault.\n\nFirmware observability - Structured logging to nonvolatile memory that survives a reset, health/diagnostic reporting the fleet can read, and the firmware-level signals that feed fleet KPIs. If the device can't prove it behaved correctly, it didn't.\n\nHardware bring-up & debugging - Board bring-up, driver work, and the kind of debugging that needs a scope and a logic analyzer - including chasing silicon errata to ground truth when the bug could be on either side of the wire.\n\nFirst 90 Days\nDay 30: Understand the motor-control firmware and the PreScript interface. First PR to a driver or a safety state machine. Paired with the CTO on the hardware interface. You can explain the dispense lifecycle and the firmware safety invariants.\n\nDay 60: Own a subsystem end-to-end (motor control, or sensor acquisition + cross-check). Firmware observability improved - a field failure produces enough evidence to diagnose it remotely. Hardware-in-loop tests expanded.\n\nDay 90: A full dispense driven through your firmware on real hardware, with the safety interlocks and cross-checks proven under fault injection. Every critical signal is cross-checked; every fault has a defined safe state and a runbook.\n\nWhat We're Looking For\nMust-Have\n5+ years embedded / firmware - bare-metal and/or RTOS, in C/C++ and/or Rust, shipped to production hardware.\n\nMotor / motion control - PWM, timers, DMA, current sensing, control loops. You reason in timing budgets, not just function calls.\n\nMicrocontroller depth - ARM Cortex-M (STM32 or similar): interrupts, DMA, clock trees, peripherals. You've read a datasheet and an errata sheet to ground truth.\n\nSafety-critical systems - you've built firmware where failure has physical consequences (medical, automotive, avionics, robotics, industrial). Fail-closed is a reflex, not a checklist.\n\nState machines - you design in states and transitions and can reason about every edge, including the fault edges.\n\nImportant\nHardware/software debugging - scope, logic analyzer, JTAG/SWD.\n\nSerial / hardware interfaces - UART, SPI, I2C, RS485, TCP, protobuf, or similar custom wire protocols.\n\nReal-time reasoning - deadlines, jitter, priority inversion, worst-case timing.\n\nFirmware observability - logging that survives a reset, remote diagnostics, fault forensics from the field.\n\nNice-to-Have\nPower electronics / gate-driver debugging.\n\nJetson / embedded Linux adjacency.\n\nRobotics: sensor fusion, motion planning, control theory.\n\nHealthcare or other regulated / audited industry experience.\n\nHow We Hire\nRecruiter Screen (30 min)\n\nTechnical Interview (90 min) - a take-home walkthrough plus a live design exercise; we fix and improve together and talk through operational and safety thinking.\n\nDesign Interview (60 min) - we go deeper on a control/observability subsystem: how it fails, how you'd know, and how you make the bad state impossible.\n\nLeadership Interview (60 min) - culture, mission, and long-term fit.\n\nWhat We Offer\nEarly-stage equity in automated pharmacy dispensing at scale\n\nDirect impact - your firmware physically, safely moves medication for real patients\n\nSmall team, zero bureaucracy, high trust\n\nHard problems: safety-critical firmware, real-time hardware integration, regulatory compliance\n\nCompensation & Benefits\nCompetitive salary\n\nMeaningful early-stage equity\n\nHealth, 401(k), unlimited PTO\n\nWhy Join Us Now?\nImpact & Growth\nDirect Patient Impact: Your firmware will improve healthcare outcomes for millions of patients\n\nMarket Leadership: Ground-floor opportunity to define an entirely new category of healthcare technology\n\nTechnical Innovation: Genuinely novel problems at the intersection of AI, robotics, and healthcare\n\nCareer Acceleration: High-visibility role with significant growth potential as the company scales\n\nTeam and Culture\nWorld-Class Team: Work alongside exceptional engineers, AI researchers, and healthcare experts\n\nReports to the Head of Software Engineering with significant autonomy and influence\n\nDirect Access: Work directly with the CTO on the hardware interface, with real autonomy and influence\n\nInnovation Focus: Culture that prioritizes breakthrough thinking and rapid experimentation\n\nMission-Driven: United around transforming healthcare through technology\n\nOur Values\nServant Leadership: Make those around you better. We serve our teams the way Queue serves communities: 4,000 pharmacies close each year and deserts are spreading - we’re here to reverse that.\n\nDo the Hard Things: Healthcare, hardware, and company-building are all hard. We do them anyway. Convenience for us is life-changing for those we serve.\n\nOwn Your Work: Be accountable; take pride in what you ship. Queue lives and dies by what you do - own it fully.\n\nDefault is Now: There’s never a better time than today. Default to action: what can we prove, learn, or simplify right now?\n\nContact: If you have any questions, please contact us at ","description_format":"text","description_chars":7869,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Robotics AI","Pharmacies"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-28T14:50:55Z"}],"liveness":{"score":12,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.433,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":112,"expected_fill_days":29,"reasons":["conf:25","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-01T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/queue-seniorstaff-firmware-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/queue-seniorstaff-firmware-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-01T12:20:24Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":3691,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":1309,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-02T00:00:00Z"}}}