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Firestorm is building expeditionary defense manufacturing and autonomous systems, including modular unmanned aircraft and deployable microfactories. The Embedded Linux Software Team Lead will report to the Flight Systems Software Lead and manage a team while serving as a hands-on individual contributor.
Key responsibilities include team management (standups, task prioritization, architecture reviews), designing and implementing Linux core daemons in modern C++, and defining clean REST APIs with versioning strategies. You'll deliver software packages across Linux, Windows, and Android platforms, own the developer experience through documentation and SDKs, and engineer for real-time, mission-critical performance with deterministic behavior and bounded latencies on constrained hardware.
Security is paramount: implement memory-safe patterns, least-privilege design, secure transport protocols (OpenSSL/libsodium), and supply-chain integrity for dependencies. Build reliability through cross-platform CI/CD (CMake, Conan/vcpkg), automated testing (Catch2, GoogleTest, pytest), fuzzing, and sanitizers. Collaborate across engineering disciplines—autonomy, avionics, applications, mechanical, and electrical teams—to ensure software compatibility and interoperability with industry and defense standards.
You'll contribute to operability through diagnostics, tracing, metrics, and field integration support. The role requires U.S. citizenship and ability to obtain a security clearance. Minimum qualifications: Bachelor's in Computer Science or related field, 5+ years embedded systems and Linux development in C/C++, 2+ years leading teams with people management, proven Linux daemon and systemd experience, 5+ years with real-time/mission-critical systems including async networking (TCP/UDP, REST, WebSockets, DDS/gRPC/ZeroMQ), familiarity with defense protocols (MAVLink, STANAG 4586, Link 16), expertise in secure coding and dependency hygiene, and cross-platform build/packaging skills (CMake, deb/rpm/AppImage, MSVC/MinGW, Android).
Preferred: hardware bringup troubleshooting, Linux kernel/driver experience, ROS 2, gRPC, ZeroMQ, telemetry/observability pipelines, Yocto/Buildroot, performance profiling, MIL-STD/DO-178C compliance, and mentoring experience. On-site in San Diego preferred; hybrid considered. Up to 15% domestic travel for testing and demonstrations.
