Embedded Software Engineer — Munition System
head-huntress.com · District of Columbia, United States · $201K–$250K/yr
Staffing and Recruiting · 2-10 employees
About the role
You will own the end-to-end firmware development for safety-critical kinetic munitions, including drivers, communication protocols, and state machine design. Additionally, you will collaborate with hardware engineers on bring-up and ensure the firmware meets environmental qualification standards.
What they look for
Requirements
Candidates must have 5+ years of professional embedded firmware experience using C, C++, or Rust on ARM Cortex-M architectures. Strong proficiency in hardware debugging, state machine development, and a disciplined approach to testability are required.
Full description
Experience level: Mid-senior Experience required: 5 Years Education level: Bachelor’s degree Job function: Engineering Industry: Defense & Space Compensation: $201,000 - $250,000 Total position: 1 Relocation assistance: No Recruiter Note: Candidate must be comfortable completing an initial 1-month onsite training period in Kearneysville, WV, after which they will relocate back to work from either San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Washington DC. About the project We're building a small, safety-critical kinetic munition delivered by an FPV-class airframe. The compute side is an electro mechanical safe and arm device (EMSAD). The current codebase is Rust-on-Embassy, but we're language-agnostic on the role — strong C, C++, or Rust embedded engineers are equally welcome. What you'll do • Own firmware end-to-end: drivers, state machine, communication protocols, command surface, bring-up, qualification, OTA / programming flow. • Build the host-testable simulation surface. The state machine should be testable on a laptop without flashing a board — and stay that way. • Work shoulder-to-shoulder with the HW engineer on bring-up, register-map ergonomics, and timing. • Carry the firmware through environmental qualification (thermal, EMC, vibration). • Define and enforce the firmware-side safety case. Requirements Required • 5+ years of professional embedded firmware on ARM Cortex-M (or comparable) — in C, C++, or Rust. • Deep comfort with interrupts, DMA, clocks, timers, low-power modes, linker scripts, memory maps. • Strong with I²C, SPI, UART, USB CDC and debugging using scope / logic analyzer. • Experience building state machines for real-world hardware. • Discipline around testability and host testing. • Working English, written and verbal. Nice to have • Rust embedded experience — Embassy, embedded-hal, defmt, probe-rs, RTIC, no_std ecosystem. • Modern C++ embedded (C++17/20 in firmware). • Async firmware experience (Embassy, Zephyr, FreeRTOS). • Safety-critical firmware background: ISO 26262, DO-178C, IEC 61508, etc. • Bootloader / DFU / secure-boot work. • FPV / small-UAV firmware: Betaflight, MAVLink, INAV. • C FFI / SDK bindings. Benefits How we work Small team, weekly hardware iterations, real boards on every desk. We expect concise, testable, safety-focused firmware development.
