We are looking for a Principal Embedded Software Engineer with 8+ years of experience to own the technical vision and architecture of Heron Power's embedded firmware platform. This is a critical leadership hire for a fast-moving energy tech startup building power electronics for the 21st-century grid — you'll be the person who takes a promising prototype platform and turns it into a rock-solid, production-ready system that powers real deployments in the field.
What will you be doing?
Conduct an honest, independent assessment of the current embedded platform and define the roadmap from engineering prototype to production-ready firmware
Own the long-term architecture for embedded firmware across all Heron products — RTOS, HAL, bootloaders, telemetry pipelines, and device infrastructure
Lead and mentor a team of three embedded engineers, setting coding standards, driving design reviews, and establishing architectural best practices
Build and own OTA firmware upgrade systems and fleet management tooling for a growing number of deployed devices in the field
Serve as the embedded platform's primary technical escalation point — triaging issues, communicating across stakeholders, and proactively preventing system instability
Key Requirements
8+ years of embedded firmware development with expert-level C/C++, deep RTOS experience (bare metal or near-bare metal microcontroller environments), and hands-on hardware debugging skills
Proven track record architecting — not just implementing — a full embedded firmware platform from prototype to production across multiple shipped products
Experience managing firmware for a meaningful fleet of connected devices in the field, including OTA update systems and fault-tolerant upgrade/recovery mechanisms
Prior tech lead experience: has directed the technical work of others, set architectural direction, and taken ownership of a codebase's long-term health
Strong systems thinker who can zoom out beyond a single ECU to understand and whiteboard the full product architecture — not siloed to one component
Energy demand across industries is accelerating at an unprecedented pace, and the need for more deployable, efficient, resilient, and scalable infrastructure has never been more critical. The sustainable energy transition alone demands a 3-5x increase in global electricity generation and consumption.
Heron Power is 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 less costly hardware solutions, accelerating the electrification of everything.
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Salary
$170,000 - $260,000
Location
Sunset District, San Francisco, CA
Drew Baglino
Founder and CEO
