Firmware Engineer, Tovala

• 5+ years of professional firmware or embedded software engineering experience, including shipping firmware to a fleet of internet-connected devices in production
• Strong fundamentals in C/C++ and embedded systems — RTOS, memory, timing, interrupts, real-time constraints, and the discipline that comes with code running on devices you can’t easily reach
• Experience working in Python, Bash for build tooling as well as testing automation
• Comfort working with (or willingness to quickly learn) the Squirrel programming language and the Electric Imp platform
• Experience with common embedded interfaces and protocols: I2C, SPI, UART, and the network stacks (BLE, Wi-Fi, TLS, MQTT/HTTPS) that connected products depend on
• Experience with CICD and automated test workflows, ideally Github automations and workflows.
• Demonstrated, hands-on experience with AI-assisted software development. You’ve integrated AI tools into your daily workflow and can speak concretely about how they’ve changed the way you build, test, and debug firmware
• Excellent communication skills. You can explain technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly to engineers, hardware partners, and non-technical stakeholders, and you write things down
• Strong problem-solving instincts — you dig into root causes, think about second-order effects, and find pragmatic solutions in messy real-world systems
• A degree in computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, or commensurate experience
• Solution-Minded: You focus on outcomes, not output. You want to understand the customer problem before you start writing firmware, and you’re not precious about your approach if a better one emerges
• AI-Forward: You see AI tools as a fundamental shift in how software — firmware included — gets built. You’re already using them daily and have thoughts on how teams should adopt them in safety-conscious, hardware-adjacent contexts
• Cross-Functional Collaborator: You thrive working alongside hardware, thermal, quality, manufacturing, ops, and backend teammates. You communicate clearly and care about the end-to-end product experience
• Startup Mindset: You’re comfortable in an environment where priorities evolve and where your work has direct, visible impact on customers’ kitchens
• Curious and Adaptive: You stay current on hardware, firmware, and AI tooling, and you have a favorite microprocessor brand — maybe even a favorite oscilloscope brand

Desirable

• We're Tovala, a food-tech company reinventing home cooking through hardware, software, and fresh food delivery
• We're hiring a Senior Firmware Engineer to help raise the bar on the connected oven at the heart of every Tovala kitchen
• You'll partner with our firmware lead (5+ years on the team) as a true peer and own meaningful slices of the fleet end-to-end
• We run two oven fleets in parallel: a mature legacy fleet, built on the Electric Imp stack coded in Squirrel powering most of our installed base, and a new fleet built on our in-house IoT stack, utilizing ESP32, C and AWS
• You'll focus on keeping the legacy fleet healthy and de-risking changes, while contributing to the new fleet as it grows
• AI-assisted development is reshaping how our team works, and we expect the same on firmware
• You should have hands-on experience with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot and strong opinions on applying them well in embedded contexts where the constraints differ from typical web/backend work
• Design, build, test, and ship firmware for our connected ovens — starting with the Electric Imp / Squirrel fleet that serves the majority of our customers today, and contributing to our new ESP32 based platform as it scales
• Own bug fixes, feature additions, and performance/efficiency 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 the bench and on real fleet subsets. We push firmware to tens of thousands of ovens in customers’ kitchens, and we take that seriously
• Use AI-assisted development tools as a core part of how you work — for code generation, debugging, test scaffolding, log analysis, and documentation — while applying the judgment that embedded work demands
• Collaborate closely with our thermal, mechanical, and quality engineers, our manufacturing and ops partners, and our backend team to root-cause issues that span the full stack — firmware, hardware, cloud, and the factory floor
• Help evolve our firmware development practices: code review standards, test infrastructure, release processes, and how we incorporate AI tooling responsibly
• Document and communicate clearly so your work is durable, your tradeoffs are visible, and your teammates can build on top of what you ship