Principal Systems Software Engineer

Owl Labs is seeking an experienced systems engineer to join our diverse development team. The ideal candidate is an expert software engineer with demonstrable systems-level thinking. You can see the big picture of how both hardware and software contribute to a successful product. You love to write code that acts upon sensor data, and you enjoy cross-functional collaboration with hardware engineers. Bonus if you have production experience with resource-constrained devices built around a mobile-class processing unit. Double bonus if you have production experience with audio or video devices.

In this role, you will impact some of the company’s most important product development goals as you develop the technology that is at the core of Owl Labs’ groundbreaking products. You will be both an individual contributor and a technical leader within the larger product development team.

We are looking for a software engineer with deep experience who will help us advance our ability to make sense of the world and make intelligent decisions about how to react to it. On a daily basis, you’ll carry out some of the various engineering tasks listed below:

• Work with product managers and other engineers in order to help define user-level details by providing technical feasibility/difficulty estimates.
• Collaborate with your peers to offer your expertise on their projects and well as bring their ideas into yours.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship for systems-level design and troubleshooting.
• Use your deep technical expertise to delight our customers and get them new products and features on time.
• Work independently to design and implement specific algorithms that accomplish well-defined user-level goals.
• Collaborate with a team of cross-disciplinary software engineers while you integrate your algorithms into a resource-constrained computational system that must share processing time with digital filtering algorithms, computer vision algorithms, audio algorithms, and machine learning algorithms.
• Test and debug your code and features so that you are proud of what will be tested by the SQA team and confident that it will pass.
• Work with SQA team to debug your work as you take your features to production release.
• Help field technical questions from our customer support team as they help our users have the best experience possible.
• Work on iterative releases, MVP-style, on features that generally take a month or two to develop, not a year or two.

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, et al. or a great portfolio of hardware/software work.
• 7+ years professional experience developing software for physical devices, like IoT and robots.
• 7+ years professional experience developing software in C++ and C, and ability to write clean, well-documented modular code.
• Experience with SOC and/or microcontroller development.
• Proficiency developing software in a Linux environment.
• Strong engineering test & debug skills for complex real-time systems.
• Experience with version control (preferably Git) and bug tracking systems.
• Proven creativity in developing for resource-constrained hardware environments.
• Ability and desire to develop with the end-user in mind.
• Proactive and clear communication abilities.
• Appreciation for documentation.
• Co-worker & customer empathy.

The best candidates will have:

• 10+ years professional experience developing software in C++ for physical devices.
• Track record of technical leadership and mentorship.
• Proficiency developing not only high-level decision-oriented algorithms but also lower-level code that interfaces with sensors and actuators.
• Skillful at code instrumentation for algorithm development and debug.
• Great track record of knowing when to switch between simulation and the real-world for both development and testing.
• Love of developing for resource-constrained hardware platforms.
• Experience working within embedded Linux or embedded Android.
• Experience developing for mobile-class SOC.
• Experience building software for consumer products.

The best candidates will share examples of:

• Grit & resilience.
• Empathy.
• Leadership and the development of people on their past teams. 
• Problem solving.
• Work ethic.
• Drive.
• Curiosity.
• Teamwork & collaboration with peers/co-workers. 
• A measurable history of performance.
• Self-awareness & coachability.

Owl Labs is a hybrid company, we are over 40% remote, and our headquarters is based in Boston, MA. This role can be either an on-site or remote position. Please specify in your application.