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Tovala is a food-tech company reinventing home cooking through connected hardware, software, and fresh food delivery. We're seeking a Senior Firmware Engineer to own meaningful slices of our connected oven fleet end-to-end.
You'll partner with our firmware lead as a true peer, working across two parallel oven fleets: a mature legacy fleet built on Electric Imp/Squirrel powering most of our installed base, and a new in-house IoT stack utilizing ESP32, C, and AWS. Your focus will be keeping the legacy fleet healthy while de-risking changes and contributing to the new fleet as it scales.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design, build, test, and ship firmware for connected ovens across both legacy and new platforms
- Own bug fixes, feature additions, and performance improvements end-to-end from scoping through lab testing, staged fleet rollout, and production monitoring
- Write, monitor, and maintain automated firmware test pipelines
- Design and execute test plans on bench and real fleet subsets (tens of thousands of ovens in customer kitchens)
- Use AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) as core workflow for code generation, debugging, test scaffolding, log analysis, and documentation
- Collaborate across thermal, mechanical, quality engineers, manufacturing/ops partners, and backend teams to root-cause full-stack issues
- Help evolve firmware development practices: code review standards, test infrastructure, release processes, and responsible AI tooling integration
- Document and communicate clearly to ensure durability and enable teammates to build on your work
The role is hybrid with strong preference for Chicago HQ or Urbana (R&D facility). Primarily remote work possible for right candidates with own electronics bench and equipment.
Requirements:
- 5+ years professional firmware or embedded software engineering experience, including shipping firmware to production fleets of internet-connected devices
- Strong C/C++ fundamentals and embedded systems knowledge: RTOS, memory management, timing, interrupts, real-time constraints
- Experience with Python and Bash for build tooling and testing automation
- Comfort with Squirrel programming language and Electric Imp platform (or willingness to quickly learn)
- Hands-on experience with embedded interfaces/protocols: I2C, SPI, UART, BLE, Wi-Fi, TLS, MQTT/HTTPS
- Experience with CI/CD and automated test workflows, ideally GitHub automations
- Demonstrated hands-on experience with AI-assisted software development tools integrated into daily workflow
- Excellent communication skills explaining technical decisions to engineers, hardware partners, and non-technical stakeholders
- Strong problem-solving instincts for root-cause analysis in complex real-world systems
- Degree in computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, or commensurate experience
Nice to Have:
- Direct Electric Imp OS and Squirrel experience
- ESP32 and modern embedded toolchains (ESP-IDF, FreeRTOS)
- Cloud IoT infrastructure experience (AWS IoT Core, device shadows, OTA pipelines, telemetry)
- Web technologies: TypeScript, React, Flask, Go, SQL
- Manufacturing/factory tooling: firmware flashing, provisioning, verification systems; remote debugging with overseas partners
- Hardware skills: reading schematics/PCB layouts, oscilloscope/logic analyzer proficiency, component specification, switch-mode power supply familiarity
- Connected consumer product or food-tech company experience
