Firmware Engineer

About Human Archive

Human Archive is a robotics data lab founded by Stanford and UC Berkeley dropouts. We work alongside frontier robotics labs and foundation model research groups to collect large-scale, real-world, annotated multimodal datasets of humans performing everyday tasks across household and industrial environments.

We are lean, technical, and operate at extreme speed, taking on unglamorous and conventionally impossible problems that directly unlock step-function gains in model capability.

The deployment of capable humanoids at scale will permanently redefine human labor. Undesirable physical work will disappear, and human effort will shift toward a new era of abundant creativity. This shift is inevitable, and we are building the infrastructure to accelerate it.

We are assembling the best team to solve the hardest problems in embodied intelligence. You will own meaningful systems from day one and see your work directly impact model capabilities. This is a once-in-a-generation inflection point. If you want to leave your dent on humanity and reshape physical labor markets forever, join us!

About the Role

The firmware engineer will own the real-time firmware layer of a battery-powered wearable platform — responsible for deterministic sensor acquisition, timestamp alignment, system state control, and reliable communication between the microcontroller and embedded Linux compute.

You will operate under technical direction from the Head of Engineering.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain firmware for a dedicated MCU responsible for aggregating distributed sensors — implementing robust SPI and peripheral drivers and ensuring stable high-frequency acquisition.
• Architect and implement the system timebase and synchronization strategy across multiple sensor domains, including deterministic event handling and timestamp propagation.
• Develop hardware-level control logic for user inputs and system indicators with interrupt-driven reliability.
• Design boot, shutdown, and fault-recovery mechanisms: watchdog strategies, brownout handling, corruption prevention during unexpected power events.
• Implement a deterministic communication boundary between MCU and the embedded Linux compute layer, including packet structures, buffering strategies, and error handling.

Required Qualifications

• 3-6 years of embedded firmware development experience.
• Strong proficiency in C or C++ for MCU environments.
• Experience with STM32 or equivalent modern MCU platforms.
• Deep understanding of SPI, I2C, UART, and interrupt-driven design.
• Experience building timing-sensitive firmware and deterministic data pipelines.
• Hands-on debugging with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and similar lab tools.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience developing firmware for multi-sensor systems requiring precise synchronization.
• Familiarity with real-time constraints in robotics, drones, or motion capture.
• Experience with battery-powered hardware and safe state transitions.
• Background in field-deployable embedded systems.

To Apply

• Resume (PDF)
• Portfolio or GitHub (if applicable)