Founding Engineer (Firmware/Systems)

EQL Tech · Burlingame, CA

Posted 7/28/2026 · last confirmed live 9/3/2026

Founding Engineer (Firmware/Systems) On-site · Engineering, Product & Tech · Full time San Francisco, California, United States Description Our client is a stealth, seed-stage startup building an AI-powered wearable platform for industrial field technicians - running a real-time computer-vision and agentic AI system directly on smart-glasses hardware, live today with major data-center, energy, and industrial customers across multiple countries. Backed by a $5M seed round and founded by researchers from Harvard/NASA (computer vision, published at NeurIPS and ICCV) and MIT (machine learning, ex-quant researcher). The bet: computer vision and agentic vision-language models (VLMs) grounded in real integrations with legacy enterprise systems (ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce) - not another LLM wrapper. The industrial data this generates is also laying the groundwork for robotics automation down the line. This is the systems seat closest to the hardware: real work on the wearable device itself, plus the backend and edge layers around it. Firmware experience is a genuine requirement here. What you'll do Flash, patch, and adapt vendor firmware; work in embedded Linux/RTOS or device SDKs Evaluate camera/sensor hardware and define specs (FOV, battery, thermal, compute, latency) alongside the hardware ODM partner Build backend systems on a modern startup stack, comfortable close to the metal (C/C++/Rust) Own a real-time multimodal pipeline end-to-end: capture/encoding, low-latency transport, low-latency model serving Location & culture Fully on-site in the SF Bay Area. The founding team lives and works together for the first several months in a shared house before moving to a standard office — expect an intense, in-person, high-ownership culture. Hours flex for exceptional, senior talent; the priority is getting the right person, not saving on salary. Requirements Essential 1–4 years software engineering (more if exceptional); founding-engineer/early-startup experience, or from an intense-culture company (e.g. Tesla, SpaceX, Anduril, top YC) Real firmware/embedded experience: vendor firmware work, embedded Linux/RTOS or device SDKs, hardware spec-writing Back-end-leaning full-stack on a modern stack (AWS, GCP, Supabase, Railway), comfortable in C/C++/Rust Owns a real-time multimodal pipeline end-to-end Particularly valuable Edge/on-device inference On-prem/air-gapped deployment experience (aerospace, defense, critical infrastructure) Hardware-to-software integration across wearables, cameras, robotics, IoT, or drones Benefits Compensation & benefits Base: $150K–$200K Equity: 2%–3% (flexed higher for exceptional candidates) Visa sponsorship available (O-1, TN, E-3, H-1B1, H-1B transfer, F-1 OPT/STEM OPT) How to apply: resume plus a short description of a firmware/embedded system you've shipped.

How your resume reads against this

What this posting states beside what your resume says. No match percentage: there is not an honest one to give.

This reads the resume you have in the editor, and this browser has none yet.

Open the editor and upload yours

Free, no account. It stays in this browser and is never stored on our side.

This role is published by EQL Tech on workable. SwiftFit is not the employer and does not accept applications.