Firmware Engineering Manager

Firmware Engineering Manager | SF Bay Area (Onsite) | $245K–$280K base plus equity

We have partnered with a Bay Area hardware company taking on food waste. Founded in 2020, around $250 million raised across five rounds from major climate and strategic investors, and tens of thousands of units already in homes. This year they signed two national commercial agreements, one with a grocery chain and one with a food service operator running tens of thousands of sites, both deploying from 2027.

The product is a connected appliance that lives in the kitchen and runs a real physical process: motors, heat, airflow and sensors, all managed by firmware, all reporting back over the network. Having proven it in the home, they are now taking the technology into commercial kitchens.

This is a hands-on management seat, not a spreadsheet one. You will run a small firmware team and still be in the code. The fleet is already in the field, which means the interesting problems are the real ones: an OTA that has to survive a power cut mid-flash, a device that has to pair reliably in a stranger's kitchen, a bootloader that has to work across chipsets you have not chosen yet, and a factory that needs provisioning to work first time on every unit.

The Role

As Firmware Engineering Manager, you will:

• Lead and grow a small firmware team, owning hiring, technical direction and the standards the team works to, while continuing to write and review low-level C yourself.
• Own the embedded stack end to end: RTOS and bare metal application code, device drivers, bootloader, secure boot and factory provisioning.
• Own connectivity and OTA, including update resilience against power and comms loss, versioning across hardware revisions, and the health of a deployed fleet you cannot physically reach.
• Work shoulder to shoulder with Electrical, Mechanical, Systems and Product Management on a device where firmware, thermals and mechanics are genuinely coupled, and support builds through EVT, DVT and PVT with the contract manufacturer.
• Turn field data into fixes quickly, and set the test, CI and manufacturing tooling that stops the same failure happening twice.

About You

• At least 8 years in embedded software or firmware, including 2 or more managing a firmware team directly. You have direct reports today, or did until very recently, and you own hiring and performance conversations as well as architecture.
• You are still hands-on in C on MCU or RTOS targets. This is not a role for someone who last wrote firmware five years ago.
• You have shipped connected consumer or commercial hardware at volume, with wireless (WiFi, BLE or cellular) and working OTA updates, and you have carried the scars of a firmware update going out to devices in customers' homes.
• You are comfortable at the hardware boundary: board bring-up, schematic review, drivers, scopes and logic analysers, and conversations with EE about why the sensor reads differently on the new revision.
• One of these backgrounds fits you: firmware leadership on connected kitchen or home appliances, wearables and trackers, smart locks and access hardware, home energy or EV charging equipment, or another product where a physical machine sits in someone's building and phones home. Owning one subsystem inside a very large device programme, or automotive ECU work alone, will not be enough.

Nice to have: experience with commercial food service or institutional kitchen equipment; field-serviceable hardware and remote diagnostics; factory test and provisioning at a contract manufacturer; or time at an early-stage hardware startup where you built the firmware function rather than inheriting it.

You will be based in the San Francisco Bay Area, or ready to relocate there, and comfortable working onsite five days a week. The client can transfer an existing H-1B and is open to TN, but is not able to file new visa petitions for this role.

The team is moving quickly with this hire. If you want to own the firmware for a machine that turns food waste into something useful, and to do it with your hands still on the keyboard, apply now or send your CV directly to will@inventurerecruitment.com