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Urban Sky is a venture-backed aerospace startup designing, building, and operating stratospheric balloon systems for real-time wildfire monitoring, urban mapping, and government applications (DoW, NASA). The company launches flight vehicles weekly and is headquartered in Denver and Texas.
As Senior Embedded Firmware Engineer for Imaging Systems, you will own the complete firmware, imaging pipeline, and data-movement stack for electro-optical (EO) and infrared (IR) payloads—from sensor to ground command-and-control. This is a full-stack role spanning embedded systems, GPU compute, and high-rate data architecture.
Key responsibilities:
• Develop and maintain embedded firmware for EO/IR payloads: sensor bring-up, driver development, and edge compute on NVIDIA Jetson platforms
• Integrate cameras and sensors over PCIe, MIPI/CSI, and USB; develop board-support packages for custom carrier boards and microcontrollers
• Own the L0 image processing pipeline in CUDA at the edge: debayering, white balance, gamma correction, and camera/lens calibration applied to raw frames before codec
• Implement IR-specific processing: non-uniformity correction (NUC), bad-pixel replacement, and radiometric calibration
• Develop multi-frame super-resolution and computational imaging capabilities
• Implement imagery metadata (KLV/MISB) for accurate pointing, position, and time tagging on every frame
• Architect high-throughput data paths across the vehicle (PCIe as a specialty) and routing infrastructure for imagery, telemetry, and C2 across satellite, tactical-radio, and IP links
• Optimize for latency, throughput, and determinism; balance pipeline compute against onboard ML workloads sharing CUDA resources
You will deliver clean, calibrated, geo-tagged imagery proven in the field at customer events, exercises, and operational engagements. This role requires deep expertise in firmware, real-time systems, GPU programming, and aerospace/defense data pipelines.
