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Salary: USD 170,000 - 235,000 / annual
Cowboy Space Corp. is building infrastructure to power and connect the orbital economy through Low Earth Orbit satellites. The company, founded in 2024 by Baiju Bhatt (Robinhood co-founder) and backed by leading investors, is developing satellites that collect sunlight and enable new capabilities including on-orbit compute, space-to-earth and space-to-space energy transmission via infrared lasers, and secure high-bandwidth optical data delivery.
As a Senior Platform Firmware Engineer, you will work at the boundary between hardware and software, owning critical firmware and system management infrastructure for advanced compute systems destined for orbital deployment. Your responsibilities span platform firmware development, FPGA/CPLD logic design, board bring-up, system initialization, and autonomous recovery systems.
Key responsibilities include: developing and maintaining platform firmware and board management infrastructure; owning system bring-up and low-level boot sequencing for custom hardware; designing FPGA/CPLD logic for power sequencing, reset orchestration, watchdog functionality, and telemetry; developing and customizing BMC firmware using OpenBMC; implementing platform management interfaces (Redfish/IPMI); debugging complex hardware/firmware interactions across CPUs, GPUs, PCIe, and networking; collaborating with hardware, validation, thermal, and systems teams; developing fault recovery and autonomous reboot systems for remote orbital operation; and supporting secure boot and firmware attestation architectures.
Required qualifications: hands-on embedded systems and platform firmware experience; strong C/C++ and Python proficiency; deep understanding of platform initialization and boot architectures; familiarity with I2C, SPI, UART, GPIO, and JTAG interfaces; hardware/software debugging at board and system level; FPGA/CPLD development experience with Xilinx or Altera tools; and strong systems-level problem-solving skills.
Preferred: experience with server platforms, AI infrastructure, or high-performance compute; PCIe initialization and accelerator bring-up; remote management and fleet-scale telemetry; secure boot and firmware security; radiation-tolerant or fault-resilient system design.
This role offers high autonomy and ownership with direct impact on spacecraft systems, fast iteration cycles with direct path to hardware testing, and opportunity to define hardware systems for a new class of space infrastructure.
