Senior Embedded Engineer- Developer Experience

The Role
We are looking for a Senior Embedded Engineer- Developer Experience to own the developer's first hour — and first year — on the Hubble network. A device reaches our satellites using 64-FSK modulation running directly on commodity BLE radio silicon. No modem, no gateway, no cellular bill. That is a genuinely new thing for a firmware engineer to hold in their hands, and right now the distance between "I have an nRF52 dev kit on my bench" and "my device is talking to a satellite" is measured in days rather than minutes. Your job is to collapse that distance, and then to keep it collapsed as our SDK, our supported silicon portfolio, and our constellation all grow underneath it. The role splits into two halves that reinforce each other:

Build & Connect: You will make bring-up on Hubble fast, obvious, and boring — across Zephyr, nRF Connect SDK,ESP-IDF, and SimpleLink, and across the seven SoC families we support today. Reference applications, board support, quickstarts, sample code, and the written material that surrounds them. You are the engineer who notices that our getting-started path assumes knowledge nobody outside the building has, and fixes it.

Update & Monitor: Once a device is in the field, it is on the far side of an intermittent, uplink-dominant, power-constrained satellite link. Firmware updates, configuration changes, remote commands, and diagnostics all have to work through that keyhole. You will build and harden the device-side of fleet management for a link budget that is nothing like a Wi-Fi or cellular product — and design the tooling that makes fleet health legible to the developers who own those devices.

Underpinning both: you will be a critical addition to our embedded validation team's hardware-in-the-loop effort. Every claim we make about "works on 100+ boards" or "OTA with rollback" has to be continuously proven against real silicon under real RF conditions, on every pull request. You will help scale a HITL fleet that is presently the difference between Hubble Network shipping confidently and shipping hopefully.

An Ideal Candidate Has:
• A Sense of Urgency: Lead projects from concept to reality, rapidly and effectively.
• High Learning Agility: Love to learn; have a grounded approach to recognizing your weaknesses and take the initiative to sharpen your engineering foundations to better collaborate with teammates from different backgrounds.
• A Developer's Empathy: An instinct for where other engineers will get stuck, and the impatience to remove that obstacle rather than document a workaround for it.
• Excellent Communication Skills: Effectively convey ideas and communicate technical topics with engineering, marketing, and operations; write clearly enough that your work is the reason someone else's project succeeds.
• Anticipation of Needs: Identify problems, think creatively, and rapidly produce reliable and cost-effective solutions to meet the ever growing and changing needs of an early-stage company.

Key Responsibilities
Build & Connect

• Own the developer bring-up path onto the Hubble network: reference applications, board support, samples, and quickstarts across our supported SoC portfolio (Nordic nRF52/nRF53/nRF54, Silicon Labs EFR32MG24, TI CC2340/CC2755, Espressif ESP32-C6).
• Port and maintain the Hubble SDK across Zephyr, nRF Connect SDK, ESP-IDF, and vendor SDKs; drive the abstractions that make adding the next chip family a week rather than a quarter.
• Bring up new hardware targets end to end — schematic review, RF sanity, antenna tuning, conducted power measurement, first successful satellite packet — and write down what it took.
• Author the developer-facing technical material that goes with the code: integration guides, application notes, and worked examples that a firmware engineer outside Hubble can follow unassisted.
• Partner with vendors and dev-board ecosystem partners to get Hubble support into the boards developers already own.

Update & Monitor

• Design and implement device-side firmware update, remote configuration, and command handling that survive an intermittent, bandwidth-limited satellite link, including staged rollout and rollback behavior.
• Build the device-side diagnostics and logging story: what a constrained endpoint should record, what is worth spending uplink budget on, and how a developer sees it.
• Work with platform and data teams so that fleet health — link performance, retry behavior, packet success rate, power draw — is observable and self-serviceable rather than a support ticket.
• Feed field and integration learnings back into SDK priorities as reusable modules and tooling rather than one-off fixes.

Validation & Hardware-in-the-Loop

• Extend our HITL infrastructure so SDK changes are automatically exercised on real silicon: self-hosted CI runners, board provisioning and auto-detection, flashing and reset control, serial and RF instrumentation.
• Build automated test suites in pytest and Twister covering SDK samples, integration paths, OTA flows, and power behavior across the full board matrix.
• Make test results legible — reporting and historical trending that lets an engineer find the cause of a red build in minutes.
• Contribute to gateway-side and mobile SDK HITL work (shielded-room RF isolation, Android/iOS device orchestration) alongside the embedded validation team.
  Developer Community & Cross-Functional teams.
• Work closely with marketing on developer-focused content, launches, and dev-board programs — as the engineer whose hands are actually on the hardware, not as a reviewer of someone else's copy.
•  Represent Hubble in the open-source embedded community, including upstream contributions where our work belongs upstream.
• Act as an internal advocate for the developer experience, identifying and resolving friction before customers hit it.

How We Work

• Hands-On Engineering: We value engineers who move seamlessly between architecture, implementation, and debugging. You will work with real hardware, real RF, and real customer constraints daily.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: You will interface closely with the core SDK team, embedded validation, RF engineers, space operations, and marketing.
• Tools: Modern development tooling including AI, Git, GitHub Actions, Jira, and Confluence. Comfort with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, spectrum analyzers/VNAs, and JTAG/SWD debuggers is essential.

Required Qualifications

•  7+ years of deep hands-on firmware experience in C, with a track record of shipping or supporting production embedded systems on BLE-capable silicon.
• Substantial Zephyr RTOS experience — devicetree, Kconfig, west, out-of-tree modules, board porting — and familiarity with at least one of nRF Connect SDK, ESP-IDF, or TI SimpleLink.
• Demonstrated experience building automated test infrastructure for embedded targets: CI on real hardware, pytest and/or Twister, self-hosted runners, test reporting.
• Solid understanding of OTA update mechanisms, power optimization, and memory-constrained environments.
• Experience with embedded build systems (CMake, Make) and cross-compilation toolchains, including porting to constrained targets.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication: you can explain a hard embedded problem to an engineer who has never seen your hardware, and they will succeed on the first try.
• Experience working directly with external developers or customers — support, enablement, developer relations, technical content, or field bring-up.
• All applicants must be a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident (i.e. "green card holder") as defined by ITAR (22 CFR §120.15).

Strongly Preferred

• Upstream contributions to Zephyr, or an active role in the embedded open-source community.
• A public body of technical writing, talks, or demos aimed at embedded developers.
• Prior experience with IoT platforms, device management/fleet tooling, asset tracking, or connectivity products at scale.
• RF fundamentals: link budget reasoning, antenna tuning, EIRP measurement, and the patience for problems that are only reproducible on the bench.
• Cryptographic know-how; experience with PSA or TF-M is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $130,000 – $179,000 (commensurate with experience)
• Comprehensive Benefits – Health, Dental, Vision, & HSA options
• Unlimited PTO
• Commuter Benefits (if working from HQ)
• Learning & Development Allowance
• Health & Wellness Stipend
• Sabbatical Program – Recharge and explore new ideas
• Cutting-Edge Space Tech – Work on state-of-the-art satellite systems

 

ITAR Requirements
Hubble is required by the U.S. Government to comply with various space technology export regulations including the
International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). All applicants must be a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident
("green card holder") as defined by ITAR (22 CFR §120.15).

Hubble is committed to creating an inclusive environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. Each individual
has the right to work in a professional environment that promotes equal employment opportunity and prohibits
discriminatory practices, including harassment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without
regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics,
disability, age, or veteran status.