Embedded Engineer

Embedded Engineer - Scientific Robotics & Automation

Location : Flexible / Hybrid (in-office required for hardware testing; with remote flexibility)

Type : Full-Time

About the Company

Sage Recruiting is partnering with an early-stage startup doing something that genuinely matters: automating one of the most tedious, error-prone steps in life sciences research. Their product is built for cryo-EM - Cryo-Electron Microscopy, and it exists to eliminate the manual sample preparation bottleneck that currently requires years of specialist training to master.

If you’ve ever looked at how slowly biology research moves and thought technology should be doing more, this will speak to you. They’re replacing a fragile, human-dependent process with a reliable, automated system. One that has the potential to accelerate drug discovery, vaccine development, and our understanding of biological systems at a structural level.

They’re a small, focused team backed by a well-established parent company and fully funded with clear runway. This is a ground-floor opportunity to own meaningful work on real hardware from day one.

The Role

They’re looking for an Embedded Engineer to join their software team and take direct ownership of firmware, control systems, and hardware-software integration on their core product. You’ll work closely with their existing software engineer and have immediate impact on the things that matter most: making the machine better.

This is not a maintenance role. You’ll be working on novel actuation mechanisms, vision-based detection systems, thermal control optimization, and firmware infrastructure - the kind of problems that require both depth and curiosity.

What You’ll Work On

• Cooler and thermal system optimization via embedded control algorithms

• GUI improvements on their Raspberry Pi-based interface

• Firmware update mechanism design and implementation

• New magnetic drive actuator development and integration

• Vision-based grid detection for automated sample positioning

• Ongoing sensor fusion, diagnostics, and system reliability improvements

What They’re Looking For

Must-haves:

• Proficiency in C++ and Python

• Experience with FreeRTOS or equivalent bare-metal RTOS (QNX, Zephyr, etc.)

• Mechatronics and robotics systems background

• Control system implementation: PIDs, state machines, speed controllers

• Low-level communications: I2C, SPI, serial, CAN bus, Ethernet, MQTT

• Sensor handling and Kalman filtering / sensor fusion

• Firmware update implementation experience

Nice to haves:

• Camera management and video handling

• Computer vision and feature detection

• Machine learning or signal analysis

• Predictive diagnostics

• Data analysis and sensor readout interpretation

They’re industry-agnostic. Strong candidates from oil and gas, healthcare, telecom, defence, or industrial automation are equally welcome. What matters is technical depth and the ability to own problems independently.

Who You Are

• You want to make a real contribution to advancements that will improve the state of the world

• You’re comfortable working autonomously on hard technical problems and know when to ask for help

• You thrive in early-stage environments where the roadmap isn’t fully defined

• You want to see your code running on physical hardware, not just passing tests in CI

• You care about the quality and reliability of what you ship

• You’re interested in contributing to team culture, not just the codebase

Compensation

• Base salary up to $150k (commensurate with experience)

• Stock grant with 4-year vesting and 1-year cliff

• Performance-based bonus

• Benefits package