---
title: 'Senior Firmware Engineer at Lab37'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-firmware-engineer-lab37-pittsburgh-3qj03mxy42g9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-10'
---

# Senior Firmware Engineer at Lab37

- **Company:** Lab37
- **Location:** Pittsburgh, PA
- **Posted:** 2026-11-05
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-10
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/lab37/jobs/8828978002

## Job description

## Who we are

[Lab37 Robotics](https://www.lab37.us/), is a technology company focused on the development and deployment of robots designed specifically for direct-to-customer food production. Our mission is to revolutionize the food industry by creating innovative robotic solutions that enhance efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction. We are passionate about pushing the boundaries of technology to deliver cutting-edge products that meet the evolving needs of our clients.

## About the role

Build the firmware that brings our custom robot electronics to life. We’re looking for a Firmware Engineer to own embedded software for the boards that connect our robots’ sensors, actuators, and higher-level software—from early hardware bring-up through production deployment and field support.

You’ll strengthen our firmware architecture and engineering practices while shipping practical improvements to real machines. Working closely with electrical, motor-controls, robotics software, and manufacturing engineers, you’ll help define hardware/software interfaces, diagnose difficult failures, and make our boards easier to test, deploy, and service.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role with substantial technical ownership. You should be comfortable turning an ambiguous problem into a plan, working at the bench, and leaving behind reliable software and tools that others can use.

## What you’ll do

- Design and maintain embedded C firmware for custom microcontroller boards, including device drivers, board support, communication protocols, and application state machines. Build reusable components across board revisions and robot platforms.
- Partner with electrical engineers on component selection, schematic reviews, debug access, and testability. Bring up new boards and investigate failures using datasheets, measurements, and targeted experiments.
- Implement predictable real-time behavior across interrupts, DMA, peripheral interfaces, and bare-metal or RTOS tasks. Measure timing and resource use, and address concurrency, latency, and memory constraints.
- Define clear contracts between boards and robot software: commands, state reporting, timeouts, fault handling, and version compatibility. Integrate sensors and actuator interfaces with the robotics and motor-controls teams.
- Design robust startup, watchdog, brownout, communication-loss, and recovery behavior. Implement and verify agreed safe states with hardware and system owners, and expose diagnostics that make intermittent failures actionable.
- Own firmware delivery and serviceability: bootloaders, validated updates and recovery paths, board identification, versioned configuration and calibration, and compatibility checks that help prevent incorrect deployment.
- Build automated unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop tests, including fault injection and long-duration testing. Develop tools for production bring-up, calibration, manufacturing tests, and diagnostics, and integrate them into shared CI and release workflows.
- Follow production issues through root cause and prevention. Document design decisions, interfaces, and troubleshooting procedures; participate in reviews and help teammates build confidence working with embedded systems.

## What we are looking for

- A track record of shipping microcontroller firmware on custom hardware and supporting it beyond the prototype stage. You can explain your own architecture decisions, debugging work, and lessons from deployed products.
- Strong C or C++ skills for resource-constrained systems, with a solid understanding of memory, interrupts, concurrency, peripheral registers, and real-time execution. Practical bare-metal and RTOS experience.
- Hands-on board bring-up and debugging skills. You can read schematics and datasheets, use oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, and debug firmware through SWD/JTAG or equivalent tools.
- Experience implementing and troubleshooting embedded interfaces such as CAN, SPI, I2C, and UART, with the ability to reason about timing, corrupted or missing data, and recovery.
- A disciplined approach to reliability: maintainable designs, meaningful automated tests, reproducible builds, version control, code review, and useful diagnostics. Python or comparable scripting skills for test and development tools.
- Independent judgment and collaborative ownership. You prioritize effectively, surface risks early, distinguish evidence from assumptions, and communicate clearly across software and hardware teams.

Helpful, but not required

- CAN-FD, CANopen/CiA 402, or comparable distributed device protocols; integration with Linux-based robot software via Ethernet.
- Bootloaders, secure firmware update mechanisms, persistent configuration, calibration, and production programming or test fixtures.
- Motor-driver integration, encoders, PWM/ADC synchronization, or embedded implementation of control loops.
- Robotics, industrial automation, appliances, or other electromechanical products with demanding uptime and service needs; hardware-in-the-loop infrastructure or Bazel-based embedded builds.

## Why join us

- Demand for online food delivery is growing really fast! In the last 5 years, just in the US, the overall market has expanded 10X from $10B to $100B, and could expand to $500bn- $1T by 2030.
- Changing the restaurant industry: You’ll be part of a team that helps restaurants succeed in online food delivery.
- Collaborative environment: You will receive support and guidance from experienced colleagues and managers, helping you to learn, grow and achieve your goals, and you’ll work closely with other teams to ensure our customer’s success.

What else you need to know

This role is based in our Pittsburgh office. As a company driven by invention and continuous change - we are constantly reimagining our industries, building new products, and refining how we operate. We do our best work together. That’s why all of our office-based teams work onsite, five days a week.

The base salary range for this role is $158,000 - $218,000 per year.

Actual compensation will be determined on an individual basis and may vary depending on experience, skills, and qualifications.

Base salary is just one part of your total rewards package. You may also be eligible for equity awards and an annual performance-based bonus.

Benefits Summary (USA Full-Time Exempt Employees):

- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (multiple plans, incl. HSA options).
- Company-paid life and disability insurance (short- and long-term).
- Voluntary insurance: accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity.
- Optional supplemental life insurance for self, spouse, and children.
- Pet insurance discount.
- 401(k).
- Health Savings Account (HSA)
- Flexible Spending Accounts (Healthcare, Dependent Care, Commuter)
- Time Off policies:
- Discretionary vacation days
- 8 paid holidays per year
- Paid sick time
- Paid Bereavement leave
- Paid Parental Leave

Benefits are subject to change at the company's discretion. Atoms accepts applications on an ongoing basis.

Ready to join us as we serve those who serve others?

#LI-Onsite

## About Lab37

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Lab37 builds robotic kitchen systems that automate food assembly, starting with the Bowl Builder for makeline operations, to help restaurants reduce labor, increase throughput, and deliver consistent quality at scale.
- **Entity Type**: Private (subsidiary of City Storage Systems; no disclosed funding rounds)
- **Headquarters**: Warrendale, PA (near Pittsburgh, PA)
- **Founded**: 2005 (founding team formed at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, lab G37)
- **Founders**: Not publicly named (founding team from CMU Robotics Institute)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Food robotics / kitchen automation / food service technology
- Target customers: B2B – restaurants, ghost kitchens, food businesses (enterprise and multi-location operators)
- Mission: "Use technology to improve the physical world in ways people can feel" and "build robots for better food" – making high-quality, affordable food accessible to everyone through automation.

## Products & Services
- **[Bowl Builder](https://www.lab37.us/)**: A robotic makeline system that automates the assembly of bowls and similar meals. It handles live order assembly from bowl dispense to bag close, adapts to customizations (adding/removing ingredients, allergens, portion adjustments), and claims up to 50% labor savings while doubling output. Type: Hardware (robotic kitchen equipment) with integrated software.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (subsidiary of City Storage Systems, a private holding company)
- **Key Metric**: Already deployed in commercial kitchens, serving thousands of customers weekly (as of June 2026)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: City Storage Systems (parent company); sister companies include CloudKitchens, Otter, and Picnic. No external investors publicly listed.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring across multiple engineering roles; expanding from initial product (Bowl Builder) into broader kitchen ecosystem; rapid iteration capability (whiteboard to prototype in hours); real-world commercial deployments.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack R&D under one roof**: In-house fabrication shop, electrical engineering lab, testing facilities, and R&D kitchen enable rapid prototyping and iteration.
- **Ecosystem integration**: As part of City Storage Systems, Lab37 works alongside CloudKitchens (ghost kitchen infrastructure), Otter (restaurant tech), and Picnic (food automation) – creating a vertically integrated automation stack for food businesses.
- **Data-driven tuning**: Every gram, step, and variable is tracked and refined, allowing precision and consistency at scale.
- **Proven real-world impact**: Systems already operating in commercial kitchens, not just prototypes.

## Strategic Focus
- Scale Bowl Builder adoption across multi-location restaurant groups.
- Expand the kitchen ecosystem with additional robotic modules and software.
- Continue to reduce labor dependency and operational chaos for food businesses.
- Leverage data from real kitchens to improve automation algorithms.

## Why Work Here
- **Engineering freedom**: "Whiteboard to working prototype in hours" – engineers build, test, and iterate with their own hands in a maker's paradise (full fabrication shop, electrical lab, testing facilities).
- **Immediate impact**: Work is deployed in real kitchens serving thousands of customers weekly; employees see their work making a difference quickly.
- **Culture**: Described as a place where "culinary innovation meets world class engineering" – cross-disciplinary collaboration between robotics, software, hardware, and culinary teams.
- **Locations**: Warrendale, PA and Pittsburgh, PA (on-site roles). No explicit remote/hybrid policy stated.
- **Perks**: Not detailed publicly, but the facility includes a fully equipped R&D kitchen, modern fabrication shop, and engineering offices built for rapid innovation.

## Sources
1. [lab37.us](https://www.lab37.us/) – Main site with product and company overview
2. [lab37.us/careers](https://www.lab37.us/careers) – Careers page with culture and mission
3. [lab37.us/lab](https://www.lab37.us/lab) – Lab facilities and ecosystem description
4. [lab37.us/history-timeline](https://www.lab37.us/history-timeline) – Company history and founding story
5. [lab37.breezy.hr](https://lab37.breezy.hr/) – Job openings and locations

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