---
title: 'Firmware Engineer at Human Archive'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/firmware-engineer-human-archive-china-t5xhkbpeehwf'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Firmware Engineer at Human Archive

- **Company:** Human Archive
- **Location:** China
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-05-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/humanarchive/d0a106eb-9431-4f4b-93e3-9656ee137dce

## Job description

## ABOUT HUMAN ARCHIVE

Human 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 on

We'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 architecture

- Firmware architecture on embedded Linux on ARM
- System state machines: boot, capture, idle, fault recovery
- Power management states and low-power transitions

Sensor integration and timing

- Drivers for cameras, IMUs, microphones, environmental sensors
- Sub-millisecond cross-sensor synchronization
- Hardware-level timestamping infrastructure
- Real-time sensor data alignment
- Lightweight on-device fusion for orientation and worn-state estimation (Kalman variants)

Data pipeline

- Multi-stream concurrent capture
- Hardware video encoder pipelines
- High-throughput storage writes
- Industry-standard delivery format packing

Connectivity and fleet operations

- Device-to-backend telemetry (battery, storage, session state, error events)
- Secure OTA firmware updates with signed images and rollback protection
- Remote configuration and fleet management commands
- Communication protocols for device-cloud messaging (MQTT-over-TLS, HTTPS, WebSockets)

Hardware / software bring-up

- Firmware-side board bring-up alongside electrical engineers
- Validate hardware interfaces (I²C, SPI, USB, MIPI)
- Diagnose timing, power sequencing, and communication faults

Required technical experience

- Strong C/C++ for embedded systems on ARM
- Python for testing, tooling, and automation
- Camera driver experience (V4L2 or equivalent)
- Deep familiarity with embedded interfaces: MIPI CSI-2, I²C, SPI, USB, interrupts
- Comfortable reading schematics and datasheets

Systems and concurrency

- Interrupts, race conditions, memory constraints, real-time scheduling
- RTOS concepts and multi-threaded embedded environments

Strong plus

- Qualcomm, NXP, or Ambarella BSP experience
- SerDes driver integration
- Hardware H.264 / H.265 encoder pipelines
- Precise timing and synchronization (PTP, IEEE 1588)
- High-bandwidth data acquisition
- Sensor fusion and Kalman filter implementation
- OTA infrastructure for deployed fleets
- IoT telemetry stacks (MQTT, AWS IoT, Azure IoT Hub, or similar)
- ROS, MCAP, or Foxglove

About 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.

## About Human Archive

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Data infrastructure for robotics and embodied artificial intelligence
- **Target customers**: Frontier AI labs, robotics companies, and academic researchers (B2B)
- **Mission**: To build the “Common Crawl for human sensorimotor intelligence” – a massive, aligned multimodal dataset that captures how humans interact with the physical world, enabling robots to automate manual labor and advancing understanding of human cognition.

## Products & Services
- **HA-Multi Dataset**: Fully aligned multimodal dataset including RGB-D (stereo depth via IR dot projection), tactile gloves, body IMUs, wrist cameras, and audio. Provides structured outputs such as 3D MANO hand reconstructions, 2D tactile force maps, depth maps per timestamp, and human pose reconstructions.
- **HA-Ego Dataset**: Monocular RGB vision dataset with wrist cameras, annotated with environment/scene descriptions, task labels, hand tracking, object segmentation, SLAM, and 3D pose reconstruction.
- **Custom Hardware Rigs**: Proprietary headset-mounted cameras, tactile gloves, full-body motion capture suits, and wrist cameras designed for synchronized data capture across multiple modalities.
- **Data Collection & Annotation Services**: End-to-end pipeline including QA, anonymization (face blurring), and annotation, delivered as structured datasets to customers.
- **Model Fine‑Tuning & Evaluation**: Internal capability to fine‑tune AI models on collected data and test them on robots to validate dataset quality.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed (seed‑stage private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding raised – $8.2 million (seed round, announced May 2026)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Wing Venture Capital, NVP Capital, Y Combinator, and angels from OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Mercor, AfterQuery, BAIR, SAIL, Brad Boa, and Meta. [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/human-archive-taps-into-indias-services-startups-to-collect-data-for-physical-ai/)
- **Growth Signals**:
  - 1,000+ active headsets deployed across multiple locations (homes, hotels, restaurants, etc.)
  - Capacity to collect up to 8,000 hours of data per day
  - Signed national‑level partnerships to scale contributor network to 50,000+ people
  - Expanding operations from India into Southeast Asia and the United States
  - Already shipped datasets to frontier research teams

## Competitive Advantages
- **First‑mover in synchronized multimodal data at scale**: No other company has been able to simultaneously capture headset RGB‑D, force feedback, full‑body motion capture, and wrist camera data in a time‑aligned manner across thousands of real‑world environments.
- **Custom hardware**: Over seven proprietary hardware products (rigs, caps, tactile gloves, suits) designed specifically for high‑quality, scalable data collection.
- **On‑the‑ground operations in India**: Low‑cost, high‑volume data collection through partnerships with gig‑economy service providers, allowing rapid scaling.
- **Strong founding team**: Researchers from Stanford and Berkeley with deep backgrounds in robotics, hardware, and operations.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling data collection**: Expanding the contributor network to 50,000+ people and entering new geographies (Southeast Asia, U.S.).
- **Building the “Common Crawl for human sensorimotor intelligence”**: Creating the largest annotated multimodal dataset of human physical interaction.
- **Vertical integration**: Developing fine‑tuning and model evaluation services to demonstrate dataset quality and capture more value.
- **Partnerships with service companies**: Offering discounted cleaning, cooking, or other services in exchange for data collection consent (early pilot stage).

## Why Work Here
- **Mission‑driven**: Opportunity to work on foundational infrastructure for automating manual labor and advancing embodied AI – a historic inflection point.
- **Early‑stage impact**: Join a Y Combinator‑backed startup just months old, with direct influence on product, data pipeline, and research direction.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/remote options available; offices in San Francisco (in‑office for some roles, remote for others). [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/human-archive)
- **Team culture**: Small, tight‑knit team (18 employees as of mid‑2026) of engineers and operators who “dropped out of Stanford and Berkeley” to pursue this vision.
- **Cutting‑edge tech**: Work with custom hardware, multimodal sensor fusion, large‑scale data pipelines, and state‑of‑the‑art robotics models.
- **Open roles**: Engineering (Research, ML, Infrastructure, Firmware, Embedded, Hardware Test) and Operations (Head of Operations). [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/human-archive/jobs)

## Sources
1. [humanarchive.ai](https://www.humanarchive.ai/) – Company website
2. [builtin.com](https://builtin.com/company/human-archive) – Company profile, headcount, office locations, job listings
3. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/human-archive) – Y Combinator company page, founding details, funding, jobs
4. [techcrunch.com](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/human-archive-taps-into-indias-services-startups-to-collect-data-for-physical-ai/) – TechCrunch article on $8.2M seed round, business model, and operations

## Other roles at Human Archive

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- [Head of Talent Acquisition](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-talent-acquisition-human-archive-india-d010qcxhmh8s) — India
- [Chief of Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/chief-of-staff-human-archive-india-06rpdhx25fvz) — India
- [Operations Manager (on-site)](https://feeny.ai/job/operations-manager-on-site-human-archive-india-89the0bwz925) — India
- [Founder's Office Intern - Partnerships](https://feeny.ai/job/founder-s-office-intern-partnerships-human-archive-india-6fzh5878617c) — India
- [Deployment Associate - Field Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/deployment-associate-field-operations-human-archive-india-k919yyjc5q57) — India
- [Operations Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/operations-manager-human-archive-india-dhnzsq0kkv6g) — India
- [Strategy & Project Lead (Data Operations)](https://feeny.ai/job/strategy-project-lead-data-operations-human-archive-india-4wewntj07j0x) — India
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- [Dark Store & Inventory Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/dark-store-inventory-operations-lead-human-archive-india-bygzve0g2txa) — India