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Scotts Valley, California, United States
Onsite
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.
As a Senior/ Staff Embedded Software Engineer, you will be a key technical force behind Heron's embedded firmware platform — driving architecture decisions, raising the bar on quality and reliability, and delivering high-impact firmware across the full stack of our power conversion products.
You'll work closely with the firmware, controls, and cloud teams to define how our converters are operated and monitored at the device level: from RTOS architecture to bootloaders, diagnostics, safety infrastructure, and production firmware processes. This role blends deep hands-on engineering with system architecture and technical leadership.
You'll work at the heart of the team building the device brain — close enough to the metal to matter, with enough scope to shape how the platform grows. You'll drive meaningful architecture decisions, raise the technical bar, and partner across firmware, controls, and cloud to ship a complete solution.
If you want real ownership over hard problems — and enjoy pulling others up alongside you — you'll thrive here.
Architecture & Technical Leadership
Contribute to and drive the architecture for embedded firmware across Heron products
Participate actively in design reviews, identify systemic risks, and help establish coding standards and engineering practices
Serve as a technical resource and informal mentor for other embedded engineers
Collaborate across firmware and hardware boundaries on system-level decisions
Real-Time & Control Firmware
Implement and improve RTOS-based firmware for high-performance power conversion
Design and build 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
Quality & Tooling
Define unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop testing strategies
Improve developer tooling and validation pipelines
5+ years of embedded firmware development with shipped product
Expert-level embedded C/C++
Deep experience with RTOS, bootloaders, and low-level hardware drivers
Experience working within and contributing to large embedded system architectures
Familiarity with firmware CI/CD and automated testing frameworks
Strong hardware debugging skills (oscilloscope, logic analyzer, etc.)
Collaborative mindset and interest in growing other engineers
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 manufacturing and field support experience
If you are passionate about technology and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment, we would love to hear from you. Join us in accelerating the electrification of everything at Heron Power.
Heron Power provides competitive compensation (salary and equity) and benefits. The salary for this role ranges from $140,000 to $220,000 per year.