Embedded Software Test Engineer (ARM/Linux)

Kraków / remote - B2B, full-time - PLN 12,000–18,000 / month + equity

About Proteron:

Some engineering problems get solved with a bigger chip. Ours can't be. Proteron Technologies is building one of the most innovative solutions in defence and autonomous systems: the Virtual Secure Element (VSE) - a pure-software replacement for hardware secure elements that gives uncrewed platforms verifiable command authority, capture tolerance, and offline mission continuity on ordinary COTS compute (ARM).

We engineer for the worst case: the platform is captured, the adversary has root and reads every byte of memory, and still walks away with nothing usable. The founding team invented the granted US patents this is built on and spent the past decade hardening novel cryptography for the most conservative institutions on earth, including programmes with major central banks.

Join and you work directly with the inventors: no layers, no legacy code, no committee between your test rig and the roadmap. The numbers you sign off are the ones shown to independent verifiers, what you prove is what ships.

The role:

Our targets are specific and gated: authorization under 50 ms on Cortex-A72-class compute, 99%+ protocol success over lossy links across 1,000 trials, tamper detection at 99%+ with under 1% false positives, multi-hour soak runs with zero unauthorized actions. If a number is green, it's because your rig proved it — reproducibly, on real hardware, in front of independent verifiers. You carry the product from TRL 4 to TRL 6.

Your first 90 days:

• Stand up the ARM board farm (Raspberry Pi CM4 / Jetson class) with CI running tests on real hardware
• Ship the first automated benchmark suite with hard pass/fail gates, latency, protocol success, tamper detection
• Run the first link-denial soak campaigns over emulated degraded links (tc/netem)
• Own the release pipeline end to end: signed artifacts, cross-compiled packages, offline installers for air-gapped environments

From there: hardware-in-the-loop with open-source autopilots (PX4/ArduPilot, MAVLink), reliability and performance campaigns across the full stack, evidence packages for external verification, field demonstrations with the founding team.

You have:

• 2+ years of professional software testing or validation on embedded Linux (ARM targets), including at least one project where you built, not just used, test automation with physical hardware in the loop (exceptional candidates with less tenure but demonstrable ownership — e.g., a competition drone team's test rig — are explicitly welcome)
• Fluent Python automation and CI experience (GitLab CI / Jenkins / GitHub Actions) driving real devices
• Linux packaging and cross-compilation basics (containers, .deb, CMake or Cargo)
• Measurement discipline — percentiles not averages, gates not vibes, numbers you'd defend
• Working C/C++ reading skills (Rust welcome); network emulation experience (tc/netem) or strong Linux networking fundamentals

Nice to have:

• PX4/ArduPilot/MAVLink
• gVisor/sandboxing
• applied cryptography basics
• building and flying your own drones

We offer: PLN 15,000-28,000 / month (B2B), depending on experience · meaningful milestone-based equity of one of the most innovative start ups in the defence industry

Who can apply:

Due to the nature of our work in the defence and security sector and the associated personnel security requirements, this role is open only to citizens of NATO member states, working from within a NATO member state. Dual nationals holding at least one NATO-state citizenship are welcome.