Firmware Engineer

Founding Firmware Engineer

About Silicon Dreams

Silicon Dreams is ushering in a future of true abundance for humanity with matter compilers. Matter compilers are machines that can make anything. Instead of starting with nanotechnology, we are starting off with advanced robotics to automate manual labor tasks across critical industries to increase throughput of matter.

We believe that applying and blitzscaling the “Factory is The Product” mindset across all goods and services is how we create abundance and reach the ideal matter compiler, asymptotically.

Raw material in.

Electricity in.

Human desire in.

Matter out.

We do not care about building a superintelligent god that upends humanity.

We are not a pure research project.

We are focused on solving real problems for humans. We believe the most important problem to solve is accelerating a future of abundance across all goods that elevate human quality of life.

About the Role

We are looking for a Firmware Engineer to own the software that runs on our hardware — from low-level embedded firmware on the bench up to the host layer that captures and moves data to controlling motors and servos. You will be the extreme owner of the firmware stack from bare metal to application, from first prototype to high-rate production.

This is a generalist role by design. In a given week you might write a low-level driver to pull a high-channel-count sensor array off SPI at hundreds of Hz, solve a sync problem across multiple RF channels, tune a motor control loop, and then go up the stack to build the host-side tooling that turns raw bytes into clean, usable outputs. You will have creative freedom to architect from first principles, but you will also own the unglamorous parts: the boot and fault-recovery paths, the release discipline, and the test coverage that keeps production runs from silently corrupting.

You will personally bring up your own firmware until it reaches a semi-stable state before handing it off. You need to be a team player, owning all aspects of the end outcomes, as firmware here lives at the seam between electrical, mechanical, and the data layer, and the hard problems are almost always cross-domain.

We believe in having small, talent-dense teams and removing friction across everything. We will always have more problems to solve than people to solve them, and we will keep it this way.

This is how Silicon Dreams builds the best future for humanity in the most efficient manner with a high bar for quality – and this starts with having high quality people who can execute and have a deep desire to be the best in their field.

If you were the one doing all the work in your class projects or college engineering team, you will enjoy working with us.

We index on high gradient and learning rates as opposed to extensive prior experience. We also prioritize candidates with a demonstrated winning spirit whether it is in engineering competitions, physical athletics, or e-sports.

What You'll Do

• Architect and implement embedded firmware (bare-metal and RTOS) for high-rate sensing and control methodology
• Write and optimize low-level drivers and peripheral interfaces (SPI, I2C, ADC, DMA, PWM, USB, radio), and bring up new sensors, actuators, and motor drives from scratch
• Develop motor and actuator control firmware, including real-time control loops, and tune it against real hardware
• Own the Linux host / application layer: the capture pipeline, data streaming and buffering, device coordination, and the tooling for logging, analysis, and automated test
• Design robust boot, initialization, and fail-safe behavior — reliable startup, fault detection, and graceful recovery across many deployed units
• Own firmware validation and release: automated test coverage, factory flashing procedures, and traceability of what code is running where
• Instrument everything for observability — telemetry, logging, and diagnostics that make it possible to debug a bad run after the fact
• Collaborate closely with the electrical and mechanical work, co-defining hardware/software interfaces where firmware performance is coupled to hardware design

What You'll Bring

• 2+ years of experience (engineering club, commercial and research internships included) bringing up real-time embedded systems from scratch
• Strong proficiency in C and/or C++ for embedded development, across bare-metal and RTOS environments, with a feel for deterministic timing and low-latency execution
• Experience writing and optimizing drivers for SPI, I2C, etc. and defining hardware/software interfaces against real schematics
• Proficiency in Python for tooling, data analysis, simulation, and test automation
• Comfort in a Linux environment — application development and the host side of an embedded system, not just the MCU
• Strong debugging skill across the hardware/software boundary: oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and serial debug are everyday tools
• Strong first-principles problem-solving and a focus on maintainable, robust code — you care that it keeps working across thousands of runs, not just on your bench
• Ability to work independently in a fast-moving, cross-functional environment

If you don’t meet every requirement listed above, but believe you are exceptional, believe in our mission, and are willing to work incredibly hard, please reach out to us regardless. We always want to work with the best.

Preferred Skills

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related
• Experience with sensor fusion and filtering (Kalman, complementary) and signal conditioning on noisy real-world data
• Experience with motor control firmware — FOC control, motor cogging calibration techniques, BLDC/servo drives, encoder feedback, trajectory or motion control
• Experience with multi-device RF / wired management
• Experience with low-latency wireless protocols (BLE or similar)
• Real-time control theory: PID tuning, frequency-domain analysis, stability
• High-throughput or high-channel-count data acquisition experience
• Calibration and self-test routines that survive unit-to-unit variation at production scale
• Familiarity with Git, CI/CD, and collaborative embedded development workflows
• Background in robotics, mechatronics, or physical-systems integration