Founding AI Engineer

About Embedder

Embedder is the AI firmware engineer for hardware teams. Our agents read datasheets, generate production C/C++ firmware, and verify their own code in a closed loop on real silicon. We are a YC S25 company backed by CRV, Box Group, and Emerson Collective, with $XM+ raised, 5,000+ engineers using the product, and 100+ paying customers across automotive, aerospace, medical, IoT, and consumer electronics. We sell software and we run a full-stack firmware design service — this role does both.

The Role

You will design and build our core AI application — the planner, verifier, debugger, and model orchestration layer that turns datasheets, schematics, and live hardware signals into working firmware. You'll work directly with hardware companies (ranging from startups to F500s), and dogfood the product on real customer projects.

What You'll Do

• Shape what the next generation of embedded systems tooling will look like and how firmware is written. 
• Work alongside our firmware and product engineers to build the industry standard framework for how AI interacts with hardware, debugging servers, test equipment and test benches. 
• Build and own evaluation infrastructure for agentic systems. 
• Design user interfaces to simply complex hardware and OS traces and visualize test equipment data. 
• Use the product on real customer engagements and feed everything back into the system.
• Help define engineering culture, hiring bar, and technical roadmap as one of our first engineers.

Who You Are

• Evidence of building complex systems from scratch, regardless of years in industry.
• You've built non-trivial AI agent systems — multi-step tool-using agents, coding agents, or eval harnesses. Bonus if any is open source or in production.
• Fluent with modern AI coding tools daily and you've built your own automations on top of them.
• You write clean, fast Python and/or TypeScript and operate well in the absence of a spec.
• You want to be in the office five days a week in San Francisco. You are willing to work some weekends.

Bonus Points

• Background or strong interest in hardware, embedded software, or electrical engineering.
• Experience at a complex hardware-software org: semiconductor, automotive, aerospace, defense, medical device, IoT, robotics, or wireless.
• "Future founder" archetype — you've started something real and decided you want to be an engineer first for now.
• Open source contributions to coding agent harnesses (e.g. OpenCode, Crush, Cline) or to the embedded ecosystem (e.g. Zephyr, FreeRTOS, Linux)

Why Embedder

• Physical AI, not another chatbot. AI that controls real hardware — drivers on silicon, signals on a scope, code running on a board in front of you.
• Talent-dense team. Ex-founders, ex-YC operators, and engineers from frontier AI companies.
• Real customers, real impact. Your code reaches production hardware, not a demo.
• Founding equity. Meaningful ownership and a direct line to the founders.
• Fun, in person. New SF office, full team in person, culture we actively screen for.

Location & Eligibility

Full-time, in person at our San Francisco office. You must be authorized to work in the U.S. without current or future visa sponsorship — we anticipate work that requires the path to U.S. security clearance.