---
title: 'Founding Embedded Engineer at BootLoop'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-embedded-engineer-bootloop-san-francisco-e7wmyc08bgp5'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Founding Embedded Engineer at BootLoop

- **Company:** BootLoop
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $180k–$280k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-04-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/bootloop/f9ff89f6-ec19-4e9e-85a4-9188f0d55414

## Job description

## The Role

Have you ever wanted to work on firmware for a jet engine and a fusion power plant in the same day? As we continue to scale our product, we’re seeking a resourceful, product-obsessed founding embedded engineer to help us bring about a step change in what hardware companies are able to develop. This is a hands-on role - you’ll report directly to the CTO and work closely with the CEO, exercising real ownership over the BootLoop product portfolio. You’ll be our closest interface to customers, using BootLoop daily to dream up new workflows and product areas, building prototypes, and helping clients solve their hardest firmware problems. As the company grows, you’ll help create a team of incredible engineers around you.

The Team

BootLoop was founded by Chris and Noah. Chris was previously at SpaceX where he was the Software Lead for the Starship Booster Catch and the Firmware Lead for the Raptor Engine. Noah is an AI/ML researcher who has built edge AI systems spanning the microwatt and milliwatt scale all the way up to agent frameworks, for companies like NVIDIA and L'Oréal. Together, we've built a team of engineers from Uber, xAI, Microsoft, and SpaceX - people who've shipped at the highest levels of software and hardware, and who are now focused on reshaping how firmware gets built.

## What You’ll Do

- Own major product areas end-to-end. Conceive, design, implement, and ship features across our platform - from desktop application to cloud stack - in close collaboration with customers
- Be our resident creative technologist. Use BootLoop every day to prototype new workflows, discover new product opportunities, and build out experiences that showcase what’s possible Work directly with clients across industries - rockets, fusion, supersonic aircraft, medical devices - serving as a trusted technical partner who helps them solve firmware challenges in the most efficient way possible
- Build the tools firmware engineers never had. Design and implement hardware-in the-loop validation systems, simulation frameworks, and automated testing infrastructure that let engineers go from zero to firmware at the click of a button
- Push the boundaries of AI-assisted firmware development. Invent novel ways to automate and accelerate the firmware developer experience using our state-of-the-art internal tools and the best external building blocks available
- Collaborate with founders on product strategy, technical feasibility, and platform decisions - you’ll have an outsized impact on changing the landscape of firmware development

## About You

- 4+ years of real-world embedded software experience - embedded Linux, microcontroller, FPGA, or ideally a combination.
- Deep toolchain and build system experience. You’ve done the grunt work of setting up the systems that make firmware engineering possible - cross-compilation, CI/CD for hardware, debugging infrastructure. You likely come from a higher-velocity organization where there was no separate tools team.
- You’re already the most AI-forward person at your company. You’ve been playing with AI tooling extensively and have strong opinions about how AI should transform firmware development.
- Track record of shipping 0-to-1 products independently at early-stage companies.
- Demonstrated extremely high degree of ownership and autonomy. You don’t wait to be told what to build - you identify the opportunity, prototype it, and ship it.
- Comfortable as a client-facing technical partner. You can talk to engineers at customer companies, understand their problems quickly, and earn their trust.
- Builder mentality. You’re not just an ideas person - you can get elbow-deep in cloud stack, firmware, or whatever’s needed to bring a prototype to life.

## Nice to Have

- Experience across multiple embedded domains (automotive, aerospace, medical, energy)
- Developer tools or infrastructure experience
- Experience in a forward-deployed or solutions engineering capacity

## What We Offer

- Competitive compensation: $180k - $280k base salary
- Significant equity: 1.5 - 3% stake in a seed-stage company as a founding engineer
- Unlimited AI spend - we invest in the tools that make you fastest
- High-impact role: You’ll define how this product gets built and own critical features end-to-end
- Direct founder access: Work side-by-side with CEO/CTO daily, shape company strategy
- Cutting-edge product: Build something genuinely innovative that helps companies build world-changing technologies
- Health & benefits: Comprehensive health insurance, unlimited PTO, relocation compensation

## About BootLoop

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: BootLoop builds the first AI agent purpose-built for firmware and embedded software development that writes, tests, and debugs code directly on real hardware.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Startup – Y Combinator Summer 2025 Batch)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Noah Pacik-Nelson (CEO) and Chris Markus (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: AI-powered firmware development tools; Embedded Systems; Aerospace & Defense; Medical Devices; Semiconductors
- **Target customers**: B2B / Deep-tech companies, aerospace & defense contractors, medical device manufacturers, robotics companies, IoT hardware developers, and semiconductor teams.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Firmware in minutes, not months — rigorously tested on real hardware."

## Products & Services
- **BootLoop Agent**: An AI agent that ingests datasheets, schematics, Altium projects, and existing codebases to write framework-native firmware code, compile it against the user’s toolchain (Zephyr, VxWorks, ESP-IDF, Yocto, Bare Metal, Linux), flash it to connected hardware via OpenOCD or debug probes, and iterate using serial monitors and test equipment until behavior is exact. Supports C, C++, and Rust.
- **Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) Testing**: The agent connects to serial monitors, debuggers, and test equipment to validate code on real hardware, generating test plans (unit, integration, compile-time, runtime) and executing them before anything ships.
- **Sentinel (Debugging & Root-Cause Analysis)**: Paste a bug report or connect an issue tracker. Sentinel localizes faults across the codebase, ranks root-cause hypotheses with fix proposals, and generates visual code-flow diagrams. Built-in static analysis scans C/C++ for security flaws, buffer overflows, and race conditions classified by CWE and risk level.
- **Automatic Hardware Understanding**: The agent extracts register maps, timing specs, pin mappings, and net connections from datasheets, schematics, and Altium project files automatically.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – Not publicly disclosed beyond Y Combinator standard investment; currently in pilot phase with early customers
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Summer 2025 Batch); Primary Partner: Diana Hu (YC Group Partner)
- **Growth Signals**: First ITAR-capable coding agent on the market, opening massive aerospace and defense markets. Actively onboarding deep-tech companies, aerospace & defense contractors, medical device manufacturers, robotics companies, and IoT developers through a pilot program. Founding team has deep domain expertise (SpaceX, MIT Media Lab, FDA-authorized ventilator).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Hardware-Aware Code Generation**: Unlike general AI coding assistants (e.g., GitHub Copilot), BootLoop’s agent ingests datasheets, schematics, and Altium projects to understand the exact hardware it’s writing firmware for, making it the only AI agent that can reliably produce embedded code.
- **Real Hardware Validation**: The agent doesn’t just write code — it compiles, flashes to a physical board, monitors serial output, and iterates until the behavior is exact, eliminating “works in simulation, fails on hardware” scenarios.
- **ITAR Compliance**: Described as “the first ITAR-capable coding agent,” enabling use in highly regulated aerospace and defense environments where data and code cannot leave secure environments.
- **Founder Expertise**: CTO Chris Markus led SpaceX’s Raptor engine firmware from first fire to flight and built the software for the Starship booster catch system. CEO Noah Pacik-Nelson built AI agents for Fortune 500 companies at Accenture’s AI Refinery and led work on an FDA-authorized ventilator featured in the Smithsonian.
- **Multi-Toolchain Support**: Works across Zephyr, VxWorks, ESP-IDF, Yocto, Bare Metal, and Linux, with support for Arm M0 to X925 and more.

## Strategic Focus
- **Pilot Program**: Currently offering a forward-deployed engineering model where the BootLoop team works internally with customers on specific firmware problems, delivering aerospace-grade code with human validation on every line, then deploying a custom version of the agent for future use.
- **Market Expansion**: Targeting deep-tech verticals (aerospace, defense, medical devices, energy, robotics, semiconductors) where firmware failure costs millions and traditional AI coding tools cannot operate.
- **Product Development**: Building persistent project context (“Memory that Compounds”) that learns project conventions, configs, and coding patterns across sessions, and expanding framework-native code generation to more embedded platforms.

## Why Work Here
- **Founding Team & Mission**: Work directly with former SpaceX and MIT Media Lab engineers building the first AI firmware engineer. The mission is to eliminate catastrophic firmware failures in rockets, fusion power plants, supersonic aircraft, and medical devices.
- **Role Available**: **Founding Embedded Engineer** ($180K – $280K salary, 1.50% – 3.00% equity) – listed on the careers page.
- **Impact**: Early-stage startup (team size of 3), meaning every hire will define the product, engineering culture, and technical direction from the ground up. The work involves interfacing with “the most transformational companies in the world.”
- **Culture**: YC-backed (Summer 2025), San Francisco-based. Given the deep-tech, high-stakes customer base (rockets, fusion, medical devices), the culture is likely rigorous, security-conscious, and mission-driven.
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: Not explicitly stated; role location is San Francisco, CA, US, suggesting an in-office or hybrid preference common among early-stage YC hardware startups.

## Sources
1. [BootLoop.ai](https://bootloop.ai/)
2. [Y Combinator – BootLoop Company Profile](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/bootloop)
3. [Y Combinator – BootLoop Jobs](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/bootloop/jobs)
4. [Y Combinator Launch – BootLoop: AI Agent for Firmware & Embedded Software](https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Nwt-bootloop-ai-agent-for-firmware-embedded-software)
5. [BootLoop Careers (Ashby)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/bootloop)