Firmware Engineer

About Human ArchiveHuman Archive is a research lab backed by Y Combinator focused on modeling human embodied intelligence.Humans are the most sophisticated biological systems we have ever observed, yet we still do not fully understand ourselves. Research into human physical intelligence — including the human hand, proprioception, and vision — remains largely unsolved. Our mission is to recover human embodied intelligence as a learned model. To achieve this, we build custom hardware products, deploy them globally at scale, and publish research. Today, our data is used for robotics and world modeling, but the broader opportunity is advancing scientific research into intelligence itself.Founded by Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers, we are lean, deeply 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.We are building the infrastructure to accelerate that transition by assembling the Human Archive mafia. 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 help reshape physical labor and work on problems that matter at civilizational scale, join us.What you'll work onWe're hiring a firmware engineer to own the embedded software stack on our wearable capture hardware. Close-to-the-metal work at the intersection of high-bandwidth sensor data, precise timing, and constrained-power embedded compute. You read schematics, debug buses, and know when the bug is in firmware versus when it's in hardware.System architectureFirmware architecture on embedded Linux on ARMSystem state machines: boot, capture, idle, fault recoveryPower management states and low-power transitionsSensor integration and timingDrivers for cameras, IMUs, microphones, environmental sensorsSub-millisecond cross-sensor synchronizationHardware-level timestamping infrastructureReal-time sensor data alignmentLightweight on-device fusion for orientation and worn-state estimation (Kalman variants)Data pipelineMulti-stream concurrent captureHardware video encoder pipelinesHigh-throughput storage writesIndustry-standard delivery format packingConnectivity and fleet operationsDevice-to-backend telemetry (battery, storage, session state, error events)Secure OTA firmware updates with signed images and rollback protectionRemote configuration and fleet management commandsCommunication protocols for device-cloud messaging (MQTT-over-TLS, HTTPS, WebSockets)Hardware / software bring-upFirmware-side board bring-up alongside electrical engineersValidate hardware interfaces (I²C, SPI, USB, MIPI)Diagnose timing, power sequencing, and communication faultsRequired technical experienceStrong C/C++ for embedded systems on ARMPython for testing, tooling, and automationCamera driver experience (V4L2 or equivalent)Deep familiarity with embedded interfaces: MIPI CSI-2, I²C, SPI, USB, interruptsComfortable reading schematics and datasheetsSystems and concurrencyInterrupts, race conditions, memory constraints, real-time schedulingRTOS concepts and multi-threaded embedded environmentsStrong plusQualcomm, NXP, or Ambarella BSP experienceSerDes driver integrationHardware H.264 / H.265 encoder pipelinesPrecise timing and synchronization (PTP, IEEE 1588)High-bandwidth data acquisitionSensor fusion and Kalman filter implementationOTA infrastructure for deployed fleetsIoT telemetry stacks (MQTT, AWS IoT, Azure IoT Hub, or similar)ROS, MCAP, or FoxgloveAbout this role Deep systems work. Long hours in the lab during board bring-up. Drivers nobody has written for the silicon you're working with. Firmware that runs unattended on real users for full shifts — and gets updated remotely without ever recalling a device.