Founding Engineer (Firmware/Systems)
Founding Engineer (Firmware/Systems)
On-site · Engineering, Product & Tech · Full time San Francisco, California, United States
Description
Our client is a stealth, seed-stage startup building an AI-powered wearable platform for industrial field technicians - running a real-time computer-vision and agentic AI system directly on smart-glasses hardware, live today with major data-center, energy, and industrial customers across multiple countries. Backed by a $5M seed round and founded by researchers from Harvard/NASA (computer vision, published at NeurIPS and ICCV) and MIT (machine learning, ex-quant researcher).
The bet: computer vision and agentic vision-language models (VLMs) grounded in real integrations with legacy enterprise systems (ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce) - not another LLM wrapper. The industrial data this generates is also laying the groundwork for robotics automation down the line.
This is the systems seat closest to the hardware: real work on the wearable device itself, plus the backend and edge layers around it. Firmware experience is a genuine requirement here.
What you'll do
- Flash, patch, and adapt vendor firmware; work in embedded Linux/RTOS or device SDKs
- Evaluate camera/sensor hardware and define specs (FOV, battery, thermal, compute, latency) alo