---
title: 'Senior/Staff Embedded Software Engineer at Heron Power'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-embedded-software-engineer-heron-power-scotts-valley-cd7y4mazz2nf'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-07'
---

# Senior/Staff Embedded Software Engineer at Heron Power

- **Company:** Heron Power
- **Location:** Scotts Valley, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-11-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/heron-power/56584d12-7011-4ac7-9cf5-d2e6035e07b3

## 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.

## About Heron Power

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Heron Power develops next-generation medium-voltage power electronics, including solid-state transformers, to modernize the electrical grid for AI data centers, renewable energy, and surging electricity demand.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: Scotts Valley, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Drew Baglino

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Electric Power Transmission, Control, and Distribution; Industrial Power Electronics; Energy Infrastructure
- **Target customers**: B2B — hyperscale data center operators, solar and storage developers, utility-scale energy project developers, and the broader electricity sector.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To build power electronics purpose-built for the 21st-century grid, helping the electricity sector grow faster and more affordably with scalable, reliable, and software-integrated infrastructure.

## Products & Services
- **Heron Link for Data Centers**: An integrated solid-state transformer + SuperBBU (battery backup unit) solution purpose-built for AI and hyperscale power needs, enabling more efficient, scalable, and reliable power delivery.
- **Heron Link for Solar & Storage**: An integrated solid-state transformer and inverter in one infinitely scalable platform, designed to streamline the connection of renewable generation and battery storage to the grid.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of **$178 million** across two rounds (Series A: $38M led by Capricorn Investment Group in June 2025; Series B: $140M led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz in February 2026).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**:
    - **Investors**: Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz (American Dynamism Fund), Capricorn Investment Group, Gigascale Capital, Valor Equity Partners, Energy Impact Partners, Powerhouse.
    - **Advisors**: JB Straubel (Tesla Co-Founder), Zach Kirkhorn (Former Tesla CFO).
    - **Strategic Partner**: LG Energy Solution Vertech (collaboration to integrate Heron Link with U.S.-manufactured battery energy storage systems).
- **Growth Signals**:
    - Headcount has grown **975% year-over-year** to 72 employees, with 58 active job postings.
    - Awarded **$26.375 million** in tax credit incentives from the state of California to build a 40-gigawatt manufacturing facility and create 600+ advanced manufacturing jobs.
    - Rapidly scaling from engineering prototypes to early customer deployments with major industry partners.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep technical moat**: Heron’s core technology is an integrated solid-state transformer (SST) — a fundamental re-architecture of medium-voltage power electronics that is more scalable, software-integrated, and efficient than traditional copper-and-iron transformers.
- **Founder pedigree**: CEO Drew Baglino was a 18-year veteran and SVP of Powertrain and Energy at Tesla, where he led development of the 4680 battery cell, Megapack, and built multi-billion-dollar energy and charging businesses.
- **Strategic backing**: Backed by a world-class syndicate of climate-tech and deep-tech investors (Breakthrough Energy, a16z, Valor) and advised by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel and former Tesla CFO Zach Kirkhorn.
- **Manufacturing-first approach**: Already planning a 40 GW U.S. manufacturing facility with state incentives secured, signaling a focus on high-volume, cost-competitive production from the start.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale manufacturing**: Building out a large-scale U.S. factory to meet demand from AI data centers and renewable energy projects.
- **Commercial deployment**: Moving from engineering prototypes to delivering integrated solutions with strategic partners like LG Energy Solution Vertech.
- **Debottleneck the grid**: Targeting the critical infrastructure bottleneck where traditional transformers and grid equipment cannot keep pace with surging electricity demand from AI, electrification, and renewables.

## Why Work Here
- **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.

## Sources
1. [heronpower.com](https://heronpower.com/)
2. [heronpower.com/about](https://heronpower.com/about)
3. [heronpower.com/careers](https://heronpower.com/careers)
4. [linkedin.com/company/heron-power-electronics](https://www.linkedin.com/company/heron-power-electronics)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/heron-power](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/heron-power)

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