We are recruiting a Sr. Firmware Engineer to contribute to our IoT teams

🌎About garden3d

We are worker owned creative collective, innovating on everything from brands and IRL communities to IoT devices and cross platform apps. We share profit, open source everything, spin out new businesses, and invest in exciting ideas through financial and/or in-kind contributions.

Our client roster includes Google, Stripe, Figma, Hinge, Black Socialists in America, ACLU, Pratt, Parsons, Mozilla, The Nobel Prize, MIT, Gnosis, Etsy & Gagosian.

We’re the software team behind innovative products like The Light Phone & Mill, and we operate a global, decentralized community space collective called Index Space.

We think of our garden3d as collective for creative people, prioritizing a happy, talented, and diverse studio culture. We work on projects that bring value to our world, and we balance deep care for the work we do with a genuine curiosity about life outside of our jobs.

🔮 Who We're Looking For

We're looking for a Senior Firmware Engineer who owns their work completely - someone who can walk into a hardware bring-up, assess the state of the firmware, and immediately know what needs to be done and in what order. You don't need a spec to get started and you don't need a manager to tell you when something's off.

You've shipped real products. You know the difference between firmware that works in the lab and firmware that survives in the field — and you build for the latter from day one. You're comfortable making architectural decisions under ambiguity, and you document those decisions so the team can follow.

In this role, you'll work across a range of embedded initiatives, from connectivity and OTA infrastructure to display integration and sensor pipelines, finding pragmatic, cost-effective solutions to hard real-time problems. You'll collaborate directly with hardware engineers, product teams, and clients, and you'll be expected to hold your own in all three rooms.

Responsibilities will include:

Owning firmware architecture decisions across one or more active product platforms
Bringing up new hardware revisions and integrating peripheral drivers with minimal ramp time
Monitoring deployed firmware in the field, triaging issues, and shipping fixes with urgency and discipline
Designing and implementing wireless connectivity flows - pairing, OTA, reconnect logic, fleet health
Reprocessing and validating firmware behavior across hardware variants and edge cases
Integrating new sensors, actuators, and communication modules into existing firmware architectures
Participating in code reviews and holding a high bar - style, correctness, and long-term maintainability
Keeping close track of project scope, timeline, and technical risk - and surfacing problems before they become crises
Communicating directly with clients to align deliverables with constraints when scope and reality diverge

🧗 Who you are

The person we’re looking for is happy, relaxed and easy to get along with. They’re flexible on anything except conceits that will lower their usually outstanding work quality. They work “smart”, by carefully managing their workflow and staggering features that have dependencies intelligently — they prefer deep work but are OK coming up to the surface now and then for top level / strategic conversations.

We believe people with backgrounds or interests in design, art, music, food or fashion tend to have a well rounded sense of design & quality — so a variety of hobbies or side projects is a big nice to have!

🔑 Must Have Competencies:

Writes production C/C++ at the register level — owns memory layout, interrupt handling, and real-time constraints without supervision
Has shipped embedded firmware through DVT into mass production on at least one product with real end users
Brings up new hardware independently: bootloader, BSP, device tree, peripheral drivers — no hardware team babysitting required
Deep RTOS fluency (FreeRTOS preferred) — has designed and debugged scheduling, priority inversion, watchdog logic, and power state machines under real constraints
Owns the full debug cycle: reads schematics, probes with lab instruments, isolates timing and concurrency bugs, writes the postmortem
Fluent in low-level bus protocols (I2C, SPI, UART, GPIO) at the register level - not just framework calls
Self-managing: sets accurate estimates, flags risk early, delivers without being chased, and owns scope from kickoff to close
Client-facing: has communicated technical tradeoffs directly to non-engineers, in writing, in real time, and been the person the client calls

💪 Nice to Have Competencies:

ESP32 at the IDF level. Not Arduino wrappers.
Wireless stack ownership: pairing flows, reconnect logic, OTA update pipelines, fleet-scale failure recovery
Linux embedded depth - Yocto/Buildroot, device tree authorship, kernel module development, systemd service design
Display pipeline integration (HDMI/DSI/LVDS) and shipped UI on constrained hardware using Qt, LVGL, or similar
Cloud connectivity experience - MQTT under load, AWS IoT or similar, has debugged a deployed device fleet
Product management instincts: can translate a vague client need into a scoped technical deliverable
Experience in a startup or agency environment where specs are loose and timelines are tight
USA based preferred for collaboration, but not a strict requirement

💸 Compensation

The pay scale in on a contract basis, ranging $150-200k/year based on experience.

🎤 How we interview:

Our interview process starts with a call where you get to meet a few members of our team. From there we’ll ask appropriate candidates to take part in a technical exercise which helps illustrate skill level and comfort.

Important Reminders

Kindly submit a complete and thoughtful application, including relevant links that help verify your work experience and identity. Applications with missing or insufficient information will not move forward in the review process.

Our team carefully reviews every complete submission, and we truly appreciate the time and effort you put into applying.

Remote C Jobs in South Africa

Sr. Firmware Engineer

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