Senior Firmware Engineer
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- HQ - Newark, CA
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Embedded
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 5+ years embedded / firmware — bare-metal and/or RTOS, in C/C++ and/or Rust, shipped to production hardware.
- Motor / motion control — PWM, timers, DMA, current sensing, control loops. You reason in timing budgets, not just function calls.
- Microcontroller depth — ARM Cortex-M (STM32 or similar): interrupts, DMA, clock trees, peripherals. You've read a datasheet and an errata sheet to ground truth.
- Safety-critical systems — you've built firmware where failure has physical consequences (medical, automotive, avionics, robotics, industrial). Fail-closed is a reflex, not a checklist.
- State machines — you design in states and transitions and can reason about every edge, including the fault edges.
Nice to have
- Power electronics / gate-driver debugging.
- Jetson / embedded Linux adjacency.
- Robotics: sensor fusion, motion planning, control theory.
- Healthcare or other regulated / audited industry experience.
Full description
About Us
We're Queue, the world's first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy. We go from sealed wholesale bottles to filled, verified prescription vials with zero human involvement.
We built Queue because no one should ever have to wait in line for the medicines they need. One in three US pharmacies has shut down. Pharmacists are overworked to a breaking point. And patients are paying the price. Queue fixes that. Pharmacists get to practice pharmacy again — counseling patients, catching interactions, doing the work only they can do. And patients get their prescriptions in 60 seconds or less, any time, anywhere.
We're backed by over $18 million from Alleycorp, Riot Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, House Capital, and others who believe the pharmacy system is broken and that robotics can fix it. Queue was founded by Nick Desai (6x founder, previously CEO of Heal) and Joshua Liu (previously Tesla, Waymo, and Zipline).
We build physical robots that handle Schedule II narcotics. Patient safety is non-negotiable, and it starts in the firmware.
About the Role
You own the firmware that physically moves the medication. This is the bare-metal / RTOS software on the motor-control microcontroller inside the robot — the layer below the edge agent, where a command becomes motion, a sensor becomes a decision, and a safety interlock is the difference between the right dose and a patient-safety event.
You own the firmware side of the PreScript interface — the wire protocol the edge agent (Rust, on Jetson-class hardware) uses to drive the dispense mechanism — and everything below it: motor control loops, sensor acquisition and cross-checking, timing-critical actuation, and the on-device safety gates that make an unsafe dispense structurally impossible rather than merely unlikely.
You work directly with Josh (CTO) on the motor-control and hardware interface, and report to the Head of Software Engineering on architecture and cross-boundary integration with the edge agent.
What You'll Own
- Motor control — Closed-loop actuation of the dispensing mechanism: PWM/DMA drive, current sensing, stall detection, and the timing budgets that keep motion precise and safe.
- The PreScript firmware interface — The firmware side of the wire protocol with the edge agent. You own the contract, the framing, and the failure behavior when the link drops mid-dispense.
- Sensor acquisition & cross-check — Read, filter, and independently cross-check the signals that confirm a dispense happened correctly. No critical signal is trusted on a single source.
- On-firmware safety — Interlocks and state machines that fail closed: the code path to actuate does not exist without confirmed, verified state. Watchdogs, brown-out behavior, safe-state on fault.