Embedded Engineer
San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 1d ago
About the job
Physical Intelligence is developing foundation models and learning algorithms to power robots and physically-actuated devices. This role is part of the Runtime team, with deep collaboration across Research, Hardware, and Fleet teams. You will drive the architecture and implementation of embedded firmware for critical data collection devices and ensure seamless integration with existing and future data pipelines.
Responsibilities
- Drive the architecture and implementation of embedded firmware for devices crucial to PI’s data collection goals.
- Work with hardware and software teams to ensure new devices seamlessly integrate with existing and future data pipelines.
- Lead the integration of embedded Linux devices with real-time sensor processing, including driver development, BSP customization, kernel configuration, hardware bring-up, and performance tuning.
- Identify and resolve complex timing issues, race conditions, and hardware-software interface bugs using hardware abstraction tools and laboratory equipment.
- Analyze and reduce power consumption for battery-operated devices, including optimizing radio sleep states and sensor low-power modes.
Requirements
- BS/MS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
- Strong software engineering and infrastructure skills, including building data pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and tools for rapid iteration.
- Comfort working hands-on with hardware.
- Strong communication skills for collaborating with hardware, software, and research teams.
- Demonstrated experience leading initiatives from concept to production on aggressive schedules, and turning ambiguous product goals into functional requirements.
- Experience leading initial board bring-up and software design for first-of-their-kind embedded devices.
- Hands-on experience with SPI, I2C, UART, USB, and debugging complex hardware-software interactions.
- Experience architecting, implementing, and debugging concurrent and multithreaded firmware services.
- Deep understanding of modern operating systems, computer architecture, and trade-offs between compute, memory, and storage.
- Experience bringing up and integrating sensors on embedded systems; camera system bring-up, integration, and tuning is a plus.
- Proficiency in C++.
- Familiarity with Bash scripting and Python for tooling and automation.
- Direct experience with Linux Kernel development, including writing or debugging drivers, managing device trees, or optimizing kernel-space performance (bonus).