Founding Firmware Engineer

Location : Amsterdam preferred / regular Amsterdam presence expected

Type : Full-time

Language : English required; Spanish nice to have

Travel : Occasional travel to South America

Pastorix is building an autonomous grazing management platform for large cattle farms. Our device work combines embedded firmware, GPS/GNSS, LoRaWAN, low-power design, solar/battery constraints, rugged field hardware, and safety-critical behavior around virtual fencing.

We are building firmware with Zephyr RTOS . The device must work in harsh field conditions with unreliable connectivity, heat, dust, mud, animal impact, and limited access for maintenance.

What you will do

- Develop firmware for Pastorix cattle devices and related field hardware.

- Build and maintain Zephyr-based firmware (west, devicetree, Kconfig, Zephyr threading and power management).

- Implement device state machines for activation, GPS/GNSS acquisition, LoRaWAN communication (US915 initially, EU868 later), deep sleep and wake cycles, normal operation, low battery, and recovery.

- Work on virtual-fence behavior: warning/stimulus logic, safety caps, and fail-safe states. No GPS fix → no stimulus. Device must degrade safely under every failure mode.

- Implement uplink/downlink message formats and coordinate with backend telemetry systems. Understand LoRaWAN MAC behavior: spreading factors, confirmed/unconfirmed uplinks, downlink windows, duty cycle constraints.

- Design and manage OTA firmware updates. MCUboot-based, likely over LoRaWAN FUOTA (fragmented, slow, needs reliability and rollback strategy) or BLE for local updates.

- Own the low-power budget: the device is solar + battery powered, deep sleep dominant, waking periodically for GPS fix and LoRaWAN transmit. You'll need to think in microamps, not milliamps.

- Implement BLE for local device interaction: configuration, diagnostics, debug access in the field.

- Improve device debug visibility: logs, diagnostic modes, test hooks, and field-recoverable workflows.

- Support board bring-up, sensor integration, antenna/power debugging, and hardware test procedures.

- Design tests for failure modes: lost GPS, no gateway, low battery, stale plan, failed downlink, reset loops, OTA/update failure, watchdog behavior.

- Work within certified radio module boundaries. Pastorix uses a controller/radio subsystem split: the chip runs application firmware, and a separate certified LoRa module handles the radio. You must understand what firmware can and cannot change in radio behavior without invalidating certification.

- Work with hardware, backend, product, and field operations.

- Use AI tools such as Codex, Claude Code, and custom agents as part of daily engineering work.

What we are looking for

- Strong embedded C/C++ firmware experience.

- Experience with Zephyr RTOS or similar RTOS-based embedded development. Comfortable with the Zephyr build system, devicetree, threading model, and power management.

- Experience with low-power wireless MCUs.

- Experience with low-power devices and battery-constrained operation. You can reason about sleep currents, wake-up times, and power budgets.

- Experience with radio communication, constrained IoT protocols — LoRaWAN, BLE, LTE-M/NB-IoT, or similar.

- Comfortable with state machines, hardware interfaces (SPI, I2C, UART, GPIO), timers, sleep modes, watchdogs, and field debugging.

- Ability to debug firmware with real hardware, not just simulations.

- Structured thinking around failure modes and safety behavior. You treat safety-critical logic as safety-critical.

- Understanding of OTA update constraints on constrained links — fragmentation, reliability, rollback.

- Strong AI affinity and willingness to work in an AI-native engineering environment.

Nice to haves

LoRaWAN (especially US915/EU868), GNSS/GPS, solar/battery-powered IoT, OTA firmware updates (FUOTA/MCUboot), rugged field devices, RF/antenna awareness, radio certification exposure (FCC/CE modular approval), and Spanish.

First 90 days

- Understanding V0/V1 firmware requirements and current field failure modes.

- Shipping firmware features or test harness improvements.

- Improving visibility into device state during lab and field testing.

- Documenting message formats, debug procedures, and power budget analysis.

- Reducing field-test risk around power, GPS, LoRaWAN, fallback behavior, and safety controls.

- Establishing a practical OTA strategy for V1.

Why this role matters

 Pastorix firmware sits at the boundary between software intent and physical reality. The device must make safe decisions even when connectivity is poor, power is constrained, and conditions are rough. We need firmware that is simple where possible, robust where necessary, and testable before we put it on cattle.