Senior/Staff Embedded Software Engineer at Heron Power (Scotts Valley, CA)
Heron Power· Scotts Valley, CA·
Role details
Job description
What to Expect Heron Power is a startup building cutting-edge power electronics for the 21st-century grid. We aim to debottleneck the growth of electricity generation and consumption with scalable, innovative, and cost-effective hardware solutions, accelerating the electrification of everything. Our first goal is to build better converters (inverters & rectifiers) to connect large-scale renewables, storage, and loads to the grid. Heron’s leadership team is made up of seasoned veterans who have designed and shipped gigawatts of power conversion products. We believe no one person knows everything. We learn together, build together, and solve hard problems from first principles. You’ll work in a fast-moving, deeply technical environment where ownership and impact are real.
Job Overview As a Senior/ Staff Embedded Software Engineer, you will be a key technical force behind Heron's embedded firmware platform — driving architecture decisions, raising the bar on quality and reliability, and delivering high-impact firmware across the full stack of our power conversion products. You'll work closely with the firmware, controls, and cloud teams to define how our converters are operated and monitored at the device level: from RTOS architecture to bootloaders, diagnostics, safety infrastructure, and production firmware processes. This role blends deep hands-on engineering with system architecture and technical leadership.
Why This Role Is Different
You'll work at the heart of the team building the device brain — close enough to the metal to matter, with enough scope to shape how the platform grows. You'll drive meaningful architecture decisions, raise the technical bar, and partner across firmware, controls, and cloud to ship a complete solution. If you want real ownership over hard problems — and enjoy pulling others up alongside you — you'll thrive here.
How You Will Contribute
Architecture & Technical Leadership
- Contribute to and drive the architecture for embedded firmware across Heron products
- Participate actively in design reviews, identify systemic risks, and help establish coding standards and engineering practices
- Serve as a technical resource and informal mentor for other embedded engineers
- Collaborate across firmware and hardware boundaries on system-level decisions
Real-Time & Control Firmware
- Implement and improve RTOS-based firmware for high-performance power conversion
- Design and build low-latency control infrastructure, fault management, telemetry, real-time scheduling, and key drivers and peripherals (PWM, ADC, communications, etc.)
- Evaluate and select microcontrollers/SoCs for new platforms
- Build safety-critical and high-reliability firmware systems
Device Infrastructure
- Design bootloaders, secure firmware architecture, and update mechanisms
- Implement logging, diagnostics, tracing, and observability tools on-device
- Define device-side communication interfaces and data models
Quality & Tooling
- Define unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop testing strategies
- Improve developer tooling and validation pipelines
What You Will Bring
Must-Have Requirements
- 5+ years of embedded firmware development with shipped product
- Expert-level embedded C/C++
- Deep experience with RTOS, bootloaders, and low-level hardware drivers
- Experience working within and contributing to large embedded system architectures
- Familiarity with firmware CI/CD and automated testing frameworks
- Strong hardware debugging skills (oscilloscope, logic analyzer, etc.)
- Collaborative mindset and interest in growing other engineers
Nice-to-Haves
- Real-time control systems or power electronics experience
- Safety-critical or high-reliability firmware (IEC 61508, UL1998, etc.)
- Secure boot and device security experience
- Experience integrating embedded systems with cloud/IoT platforms
- FPGA or ASIC familiarity
- Production manufacturing and field support experience
If you are passionate about technology and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment, we would love to hear from you. Join us in accelerating the electrification of everything at Heron Power. Heron Power provides competitive compensation (salary and equity) and benefits. The salary for this role ranges from $140,000 to $220,000 per year.
Why work at Heron Power
- High-impact mission: Work on foundational hardware that directly enables the energy transition and AI infrastructure — systems that will be deployed and operated for decades.
- Engineering culture: Values rapid iteration ("build, test, learn"), first-principles reasoning, and cross-functional collaboration across hardware, software, manufacturing, and operations.
- Ownership and autonomy: Strong emphasis on taking accountability for outcomes, not just tasks, and working across team boundaries to deliver an impeccable product.
- Transparent and direct: Culture prizes clear communication, honest feedback, and progress over posturing — "no defensiveness, no ego."
- Location and flexibility: Based in Scotts Valley, California (near Santa Cruz/Silicon Valley), with a presence in Canada. The work is highly hands-on (hardware, lab, factory), so on-site presence is expected for engineering roles.
- Growth trajectory: Explosive headcount growth (975% YoY) and 58 open roles across electrical, mechanical, manufacturing, software, and supply chain disciplines — offering significant career acceleration for early hires.
- Notable perks: Opportunity to work alongside a team with deep expertise from Tesla, Meta, and KKR, with direct mentorship from a proven founder.