Firmware Engineer

Join Tovala, a food-tech company revolutionizing home cooking. As a Senior Firmware Engineer, you'll work on our connected oven, focusing on both our legacy fleet and new IoT stack. You'll design, build, test, and ship firmware, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and help evolve our firmware development practices.

• Design, build, test, and ship firmware for connected ovens, focusing on both legacy and new fleets.
• Own bug fixes, feature additions, and performance improvements end-to-end, from scoping through production monitoring.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams to root-cause issues that span the full stack — firmware, hardware, cloud, and the factory floor.

• Comfort working with (or willingness to quickly learn) the Squirrel programming language and the Electric Imp platform
• Experience with common embedded interfaces and protocols: I2C, SPI, UART, and the network stacks (BLE, Wi-Fi, TLS, MQTT/HTTPS) that connected products depend on
• Strong fundamentals in C/C++ and embedded systems — RTOS, memory, timing, interrupts, real-time constraints, and the discipline that comes with code running on devices you can’t easily reach
• Solution-Minded: You focus on outcomes, not output. You want to understand the customer problem before you start writing firmware, and you’re not precious about your approach if a better one emerges
• Curious and Adaptive: You stay current on hardware, firmware, and AI tooling, and you have a favorite microprocessor brand — maybe even a favorite oscilloscope brand
• Experience working in Python, Bash for build tooling as well as testing automation
• A degree in computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, or commensurate experience
• AI-Forward: You see AI tools as a fundamental shift in how software — firmware included — gets built. You’re already using them daily and have thoughts on how teams should adopt them in safety-conscious, hardware-adjacent contexts
• Experience with CICD and automated test workflows, ideally Github automations and workflows.
• Strong problem-solving instincts — you dig into root causes, think about second-order effects, and find pragmatic solutions in messy real-world systems
• Cross-Functional Collaborator: You thrive working alongside hardware, thermal, quality, manufacturing, ops, and backend teammates. You communicate clearly and care about the end-to-end product experience
• Excellent communication skills. You can explain technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly to engineers, hardware partners, and non-technical stakeholders, and you write things down
• 5+ years of professional firmware or embedded software engineering experience, including shipping firmware to a fleet of internet-connected devices in production
• Startup Mindset: You’re comfortable in an environment where priorities evolve and where your work has direct, visible impact on customers’ kitchens
• Demonstrated, hands-on experience with AI-assisted software development. You’ve integrated AI tools into your daily workflow and can speak concretely about how they’ve changed the way you build, test, and debug firmware
• Manufacturing and factory tooling: Experience building or supporting the systems that flash, provision, and verify firmware on the production line, and debugging them remotely with overseas manufacturing partners across time zones
• Familiarity with web technologies both front end and back end as well as databases — Typescript, React, Flask, Go, SQL
• Experience with ESP32 and modern embedded toolchains (ESP-IDF, FreeRTOS)
• Direct experience with Electric Imp OS and Squirrel
• Experience with cloud IoT infrastructure — AWS IoT Core, device shadows, OTA pipelines, telemetry ingestion — even at a contributing rather than owning level
• Experience working in a connected consumer product or food-tech company
• Hardware-adjacent skills: For example, ability to read schematics and PCB layouts, comfort on a bench with an oscilloscope and logic analyzer, ability to spec an alternate component, basic familiarity with switch-mode power supplies