Firmware Engineer, Data Centers

San Francisco, Sunnyvale

About the role

The internet runs the world. Organizations across the world—from offices and schools to data centers and manufacturing facilities—spend billions annually on computer networking to stay productive.

However, these networks are messy and brittle. Traditional networking companies only build one piece of the puzzle—either hardware, software, or operations—but never all three, leading to inefficient silos and slow changes. Network engineers, who are the lifeblood of the industry,are often left scrambling to fix issues, hand editing configs, guess-and-checking solutions, and worrying how the ever-increasing complexity of the system they manage will break.

Meter has spent the last decade vertically integrating the fragmented computer networking industry across hardware (power, routing, switches, security, wireless), firmware, operating systems, and real-world operations. By owning the full stack, we make it exceptionally easy for any business to have great networking, internet, and Wi-Fi. We believe people who build hardware and software should be the ones responsible for it. Our ambition is to evolve internet infrastructure into a utility, and we raised a $170M Series C to advance our work.

Why data centers?

We've extended Meter's hardware, firmware, and infrastructure platforms to include Ethernet top-of-rack and spine switching.

Paired with Meter's end-to-end delivery model, customers get one accountable operator instead of a stitched-together stack of vendors — the team that designs the hardware also writes the OS, builds the monitoring software, and runs the deployment. Pricing is tied to power consumption, which is how businesses actually buy data center capacity today. Learn more about our approach to automation at meter.ai.

What success looks like

You will build and design a performant switch OS and firmware. You will work cross-functionally with Meter's engineering leadership, hardware, QA, and infrastructure teams, who have previously built some of the most widely deployed products in networking.

In your first 6-12 months, you’ll have worked towards the following outcomes relevant to our current and future TOR and Spine switches:

  • Bring new switches to production by integrating and validating the switching chip SDK, with reliable boot, all ports operational, and drivers passing QA.
  • Scale our system’s implementation of protocols such as BGP, ECMP, LACP, VXLAN, and EVPN, with one (of many) goals being observing every event on every device in every network. This will require working with relevant teams on data models and feature scoping.
  • Improve firmware releases by working on the bring up process and further automating monitoring, upgrades, and rollbacks; your work should pass a 30-day stress test with no firmware crashes or unexplained link drops.

Who you are

  • Proficiency in writing and debugging embedded Linux software, firmware, or device drivers in C/C++.
  • Experience with switching SDKs is a plus, as is familiarity with Golang or similar backend languages.
  • Understanding of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, L2/L3 networking) is helpful. However, we’re happy to have a sufficiently motivated person learn quickly on the job.
  • Excited to play an early and broadly influential role in the development of Meter’s Data Center products.
  • A mindset of curiosity and impact motivated by turning complex systems into simple, elegant customer experiences.
  • You raise issues early and are known to be dependable, kind, and autonomous.

Compensation

  • The estimated pay range for this role is $210,000 - $250,000.
  • Additionally, this role is eligible to participate in Meter's equity plan.

By applying to this job you acknowledge that you've read and understood Meter's Job Applicant Privacy Notice.

About Meter

Internet is ubiquitous, but internet infrastructure is painful.

Market dynamics to date have created a fractured industry with misaligned incentives, high friction and inefficient spend.

We believe there is an opportunity to create a vertically integrated infrastructure provider that combines hardware, software and operations to align incentives, remove friction and lower costs. The scale of this ambition is immense - if we do not fully transform a market with hundreds of billions of revenue, we will fail.

We are pursuing this with an incredible team of operators in pursuit of the biggest impact of their career, with the backing of long term investors excited by the industry transformation we can achieve (Sequoia, Sam Altman, Lachy Groom).

We’re looking for people who are excited to work on interesting problems, enjoy learning from and helping each other, and above all, are kind and ambitious. We’re building for the long term, and we’re just getting started.

See intro blog here.

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Job details

Salary

$210,000 - $250,000

Location

San Francisco, Sunnyvale

Company

NameMeter
IndustryBusiness/Productivity Software
Team Size3

Funding

Total raised

$315M

Last stage

Series C

Investors

General Catalyst
Sequoia Capital
MMicrosoft
LLachy Groom
JJ.P. Morgan

Founders

Anil Varanasi

Anil Varanasi

Co-Founder & CEO

LinkedIn
Sunil Varanasi

Sunil Varanasi

Co-Founder & CTO

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.