firmware engineer

About Us:
unspun is a robotics and digital apparel company building custom jeans for each consumer, on demand. Our mission is to reduce global carbon emissions by 1% through automated, localized, and intentional manufacturing. Our revolutionary technology is currently being realized through our award-winning brand unspun (one of TIME's Best Inventions, PopSci’s Best of What’s New), a software B2B platform powering digital customization for multiple large apparel labels, and a National Science Foundation-backed hardware team working on the future of additive and automated apparel production. We’re a fast-moving company powered by Fifty Years, Prelude Ventures, SOSV, and the H&M Foundation.

We also happen to make the best fitting jeans on the planet.

We are looking for a passionate and experienced Firmware Engineer to join our team. You will be a key technical leader on our firmware and controls team, helping to guide and implement a robust distributed control system for a completely new manufacturing process. We’re looking for someone with industry experience leading technical firmware development for robotics and embedded systems, and someone who is excited about the risks and rewards of joining an early-stage startup.

What We’re Building:
We’ve developed a proprietary and patent-pending technology at the crossroads of 3D printing and automated textile manufacturing. By skipping the flat 2D fabric stage, we can additively build custom apparel products from the ground up- straight from yarn to final product. If additive manufacturing, industrial automation, and synchronized systems of thousands of actuators gets you excited, we’d love to talk!

About You:
You enjoy designing, prototyping, and testing all aspects of embedded software, and have experience with distributed industrial systems or robotics. You love becoming an expert in your problem domain, and get excited by simple and elegant solutions. CMake might be second nature, and you’ve definitely considered adding PID control to your coffee machine. You have strong feelings about C++ vs Rust, and have plenty of cool projects to talk about. You know your way around terminal commands, and you’re guilty of browsing Stack Overflow just for fun. You enjoy learning new technology, and problems with no obvious answer excite you. You’re fascinated with the intersection of art and engineering, and continuous learning (& sharing that knowledge with teammates) is a fundamental part of who you are.

What You’ll Do:
•Dramatically increase the reliability of unspun’s robotic apparel manufacturing technology, harnessing skills in embedded firmware design and digital communications to allow the machine to operate flawlessly every time.
•Find ways to make the codebase better (e.g. removing tech debt, adding debugging or logging tools, increasing test coverage, improving toolchains or build times, etc.)
•Give feedback to and work closely with cross-functional and direct team members.
•Contribute outside of your field, participating in design reviews, building user interfaces, and teaching.

Ideal Qualities:
•Project history demonstrating expertise in robotics and automation firmware development.
•Expertise at every stage of firmware development: design, implementation, testing, deploying and debugging
•Fluency in C / C++
•Experience developing software on an embedded real time operating system
•Familiarity with CAN, modbus, I2C, SPI, RS485, and similar
•Experience implementing build tools and unit tests
•Troubleshooting integrated systems and large electromechanical devices, including the use of tools such as oscilloscopes and multimeters.
•Juggler of challenging tasks with limited documentation and tight deadlines
•A lovable human being with an attitude and style
•Someone looking for significant equity ownership in a high growth company
•Someone that is open to working on-site (following appropriate safety procedures) in San Francisco for testing and debugging. Remote work encouraged when possible during COVID WFH regulations.

If you don't meet all of the requirements listed above, but can make up for it with a voracious passion to learn how to do so, we strongly encourage you to apply.

Our Philosophy:
We won’t roll our eyes if your socks don’t match. We get it. But then, if you spend those extra few minutes in the morning matching your socks and shirt, we get that too. Our workspaces are sometimes spotless and sometimes chaotic, and we celebrate messy exploration. We work through complex problems but generate simple and elegant solutions. We strive to look at things differently, and never do anything solely because “that’s the way it’s always been done.”

We’re a team of designers and engineers, industry-veterans and serial entrepreneurs, artists and developers. We’re aspiring chess masters and climbers, bakers and photographers. Originally spun out of Stanford and the University of Colorado, we now call downtown San Francisco home, with strong ties to Hong Kong. We are looking for teammates who share our desire to work on ambitious problems and leave the world better than we found it.

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unspun is an equal opportunity employer, and we are committed to being a diverse team that reflects a broad range of background, thought, and experience. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, national origin, status as an individual with a disability, status as protected veteran, or any other legally protected characteristics. Women, minorities, and people from underrepresented backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply.