Elveo Firmware Engineer at Elveo develops bare-metal and RTOS firmware for microcontrollers on satellites. Works closely with Electrical Engineering for board bring-up and debugging new hardware revisions.
Responsibilities
The Firmware Engineer at Elveo will develop the bare-metal and RTOS firmware that runs on the microcontrollers throughout our satellites — in the D2D communications payload and across the spacecraft bus. This role sits squarely between our Flight Software and Electrical Engineering teams: you will bring up new boards alongside the engineers who designed them, write the drivers and control loops that make that hardware useful, and define the interfaces that our Linux-based flight software uses to command and monitor it. The firmware will be developed and tested on lab hardware and on our "flatsat," a satellite prototype that simulates orbit operations, before it flies.
We build spacecraft fast! So, the ideal candidate enjoys taking a board from first power-on to flight-ready firmware on rapid timelines, and is equally comfortable reading a schematic, probing a bus with a logic analyzer, and reviewing a pull request. Firmware on orbit can only be fixed over a radio link, so we value engineers who design for robustness and recoverability from the start. This is a small team, so you will work alongside experienced engineers and take ownership of systems early.
Experience with satellites is not a requirement for this position. If you've shipped firmware for robotics, automotive, drones, medical devices, industrial controls, or similar, you'll find much of your experience translates directly. Title, scope, and compensation scale with experience.
Core Responsibilities
Developing bare-metal and RTOS firmware for microcontrollers, including device drivers, peripheral configuration, interrupt handling, and hardware abstraction layers.
Partnering with Electrical Engineering through schematic and design reviews, board bring-up, and debug of new hardware revisions.
Implementing communication with satellite devices and electronics using CAN, I2C, SPI, UART, RS-422, RS-485, and other protocols.
Defining and implementing the command, telemetry, and data interfaces between microcontroller firmware and Elveo's flight software.
Building bootloaders and firmware update mechanisms that can be safely exercised over a low-bandwidth radio link, with fallback images and recovery paths.
Designing for fault tolerance on orbit: watchdogs, brown-out and reset handling, memory protection and error detection, and graceful degradation.
Debugging hardware/firmware integration issues using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, JTAG/SWD debuggers, and other lab equipment.
Developing unit, hardware-in-the-loop, and flatsat tests for firmware, and integrating them into our CI pipelines.
Qualification
Proficiency in C for embedded systemsHands-on board bring-up and debugExperience designing interrupt-driven
Required
Proficiency in C for embedded systems, demonstrated through professional work, significant academic/personal projects, or open-source contributions.
Experience developing firmware for microcontrollers (e.g., ARM Cortex-M), including drivers for on-chip peripherals and external devices over SPI, I2C, UART, ethernet, CAN , etc.
Hands-on board bring-up and debug: reading schematics and datasheets, and using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and JTAG/SWD debuggers.
Experience designing interrupt-driven, real-time firmware, either bare-metal or on an RTOS.
Experience writing automated tests for firmware you build and working with Git and CI/CD.
A bachelor's degree or higher in Computer, Electrical, Software, Aerospace, or related engineering field, or equivalent practical experience.
Preferred
Experience writing bootloaders and in-field or over-the-air firmware update systems.
Experience working in small teams with a high degree of project ownership
Familiarity with radiation effects on electronics and their mitigations (e.g., EDAC/ECC, memory scrubbing, latch-up protection, redundancy).
Familiarity with embedded Linux and how microcontroller firmware interfaces with a Linux host.
Experience with FPGAs or mixed-signal electronics, including ADC/DAC interfacing.
Experience developing and testing hardware for SmallSats / CubeSats.
Experience with hardware-in-the-loop integration and testing.
Scripting experience in Python for test automation and lab tooling.
