Principal Firmware Architect

WHAT TO EXPECT Heron Power is a startup building cutting-edge power electronics for the 21st-century grid. We aim to debottleneck the growth of electricity generation and consumption with scalable, innovative, and cost-effective hardware solutions, accelerating the electrification of everything. Our first goal is to build better converters (inverters & rectifiers) to connect large-scale renewables, storage, and loads to the grid. Heron’s leadership team is made up of seasoned veterans who have designed and shipped gigawatts of power conversion products. We believe no one person knows everything. We learn together, build together, and solve hard problems from first principles. You’ll work in a fast-moving, deeply technical environment where ownership and impact are real. JOB OVERVIEW As a Principal Embedded Software Engineer / Firmware Architect, you will own the technical vision and architecture for Heron’s embedded firmware platform. You will define how our converters are operated and monitored at the device level — from microcontroller selection and RTOS architecture to resource management, safety infrastructure, and production firmware processes. This role blends deep hands-on engineering with system architecture and technical leadership. WHY THIS ROLE IS DIFFERENT This role owns the device brain. You’ll architect the firmware platform that every Heron product is built on — shaping performance, reliability, maintainability and scaleability at the foundation — while partnering closely with controls and cloud engineers to deliver a complete solution. If you enjoy building robust embedded systems from the metal up and setting technical direction for an entire product line, you’ll thrive here. HOW YOU WILL CONTRIBUTE Architecture & Technical Leadership - Define and own the long-term architecture for embedded firmware across Heron products - Establish reusable platform software, hardware abstraction layers, and shared infrastructure - Set coding standards, architectural ethos, and development practices, while leading design reviews and mentoring embedded engineers - Drive system-level technical decisions across firmware and hardware boundaries Real-Time & Control Firmware - Architect and implement RTOS-based firmware for high-performance power conversion - Design low-latency control infrastructure, fault management, telemetry, real-time scheduling, and key drivers and peripherals (PWM, ADC, communications, etc.) - Evaluate and select microcontrollers/SoCs for new platforms - Build safety-critical and high-reliability firmware systems Device Infrastructure - Design bootloaders, secure firmware architecture, and update mechanisms - Implement logging, diagnostics, tracing, and observability tools on-device - Define device-side communication interfaces and data models - Partner with the connected systems team members to enable telemetry, OTA, and fleet management - Support manufacturing test, provisioning, and production workflows Quality & Tooling - Architect build system, CI/CD, and automated testing infrastructure for firmware - Define unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop testing strategies - Improve developer tooling and validation pipelines WHAT YOU WILL BRING MUST-HAVE - 8+ years of embedded firmware development with multiple shipped products - Expert-level embedded C/C++ - Deep experience with RTOS, bootloaders, and low-level hardware drivers - Proven experience architecting large embedded systems (not just implementing features) - Experience building firmware CI/CD and automated testing frameworks - Strong hardware debugging skills (oscilloscope, logic analyzer, etc.) - Demonstrated technical leadership and mentorship NICE-TO-HAVE - Real-time control systems or power electronics experience - Safety-critical or high-reliability firmware (IEC 61508, UL1998, etc.) - Secure boot and device security experience - Experience integrating embedded systems with cloud/IoT platforms - FPGA or ASIC familiarity - Production manufac