Head of Firmware

Department: Engineering

Location: Torrance, CA

Compensation: $200K – $270K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About Northwood:

Northwood is on a mission to transform connectivity between earth and space and bring the benefits of space to the masses through innovations in space communications technologies. We move quickly, ship prototypes and production systems, and expect leaders to be hands-on contributors who can scale teams, processes, and systems. If you like building across hardware and software and seeing your work deployed globally, we want you at Northwood.

Job Level: This is a senior leadership role. Level and compensation will be determined based on the candidate’s experience. We're looking for a seasoned engineering leader who can be both a technical authority and a people leader.

Role: We’re hiring a Head of Firmware to own all embedded-software and FPGA engineering across the company. This leader will manage embedded and FPGA teams, own board bring-up and firmware validation, and be the technical and organizational driver for delivering robust embedded firmware. You will partner closely with leads for backend, infrastructure, and DSP to ensure firmware integrates cleanly into our systems and delivery pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a cross-disciplinary firmware organization that includes embedded engineers (bare-metal, RTOS, embedded Linux), FPGA engineers, and firmware manufacturing/test engineers.

• Own firmware development strategy, architecture, and roadmaps across products — from board bring-up to production releases.

• Be a hands-on technical leader: design/guide low-level device drivers, boot/bring-up procedures, board diagnostic flows, and firmware interfaces for FPGA-to-host integration.

• Oversee electrical systems collaboration during hardware bring-up: power sequencing, PMBus/telemetry, signal integrity, clocking, and thermal/power verification.

• Define and enforce engineering best practices: code reviews, versioning, release branches, CI/CD for firmware, automated test frameworks, and firmware QA.

• Build and operate Hardware-in-the-Loop (HITL) testbeds and automated test harnesses to enable repeatable integration and regression testing.

• Partner with FPGA owners to define interfaces and verification strategies.

• Hire, mentor, and develop firmware and FPGA engineers; run performance programs and career development.

• Partner with product, manufacturing, and operations to ensure firmware meets production, testability, and field-support requirements.

• Represent firmware across architecture reviews, program milestones, and external hardware vendor interactions.

Basic Qualifications

• B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent; advanced degree preferred.

• 8+ years of experience in embedded software or firmware engineering with significant experience in hardware bring-up and electrical systems integration.

• Proven experience developing and shipping embedded software across bare-metal, RTOS, and embedded Linux environments.

• Strong familiarity with board bring-up activities including power sequencing, network validation, JTAG

• Experience with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, protocol analyzers

• Experience designing and/or integrating FPGA firmware and common IPs (SERDES, JESD, AXI, DMA); comfortable reading/understanding HDL and FPGA toolflows.

• Track record operating or building HITL or automated hardware test integration for firmware.

• Demonstrated experience building CI/CD pipelines for firmware: automated builds, artifact management, test runners, and release automation.

• 3+ years of people management or technical leadership experience (hiring, mentoring, performance management).

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience managing teams that include both embedded and FPGA engineers.

• Deep experience with high-speed data capture (JESD204B/C), deterministic latency systems, or high-throughput FPGA/embedded data paths.

• Experience with firmware security, over-the-air updates, and secure boot.

• Familiarity with DSP, modem or RF system firmware and the integration points to DSP and backend services.

• Experience with hardware test automation frameworks

• Experience working alongside backend, infrastructure, and DSP teams in a systems engineering environment.

• Prior aerospace, defense, or mission-critical systems experience is a plus.

• FPGA team management experience is a nice-to-have.

Additional Information:

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Northwood is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Northwood is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, color, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.