[Lead Firmware Engineer Application ]
WATER is a Biophysical Intelligence research company. Our mission is to teach matter to respond to life: we study how the human body and the physical world respond to each other, and we build machines that sense a body, model its state, and respond in real time. CAMA, an adaptive bed, and FLOW, an adaptive chair, are the first surfaces this research runs on. The work spans three research directions: machine learning and mathematics, bio research, and materials and electronics. The long-range outcomes we care about are human longevity and human experience.
You own the embedded architecture: real-time control, the safety layer, on-device inference runtime, connectivity, and updates. You'll work on the interface between learned control and hard limits, timing guarantees, engineering standards, and building the firmware team.
In This Role You Will
- -Own the embedded architecture: real-time control, safety supervision, on-device inference runtime, connectivity and update.
- -Design the safety layer — independent monitoring, envelope enforcement, fault detection, safe-state transitions, and arbitration between learned control and hard limits.
- -Define the interface between the ML stack and real-time control: what is advisory, what is authoritative, what the deadline is.
- -Own timing. Establish and hold real-time guarantees across a multi-axis system.
- -Own secure boot, OTA update and rollback for machines in people's homes.
- -Set the engineering standards — coding standard, review, static analysis, test strategy, traceability for safety-relevant code.
- -Work across mechanical, electronics and ML. You will be the person who understands the whole loop.
- -Hire and grow the firmware team.
What We Hope You'll Bring
- -You have shipped safety-relevant embedded firmware in a product that could hurt someone if it failed.
- -6+ years in embedded systems, with real-time motion or motor control.
- -Deep C and C++; comfortable with an RTOS, and with bare-metal when the RTOS is the problem.
- -You have designed a safety architecture, not only implemented against someone else's.
- -You have led engineers.
- -Nice to have: functional safety standards ({IEC 61508, ISO 13849, IEC 60601}), medical or automotive firmware, embedded Linux alongside real-time cores, on-device inference.