Embedded Systems Engineer (Senior)

The Senior Embedded Systems Engineer is the technical backbone of our robots—the person who turns physics into performance and silicon into intelligence. You will own the firmware that directly controls motion, perception, power, safety, and communication across both our rapidly evolving in-house prototypes and our production-bound robotic platforms. This is not a “desk-only” role: your code will run outdoors, in rain, dust, cold, vibration, failure, recovery, and scale.

At RIVR, we build embedded systems the only way that works in reality: hardware first, theory second. No simulation, test bench, or spec sheet replaces being next to a robot in the field while it fails, recovers, and pushes its limits. That’s why our embedded engineers move fluidly between early experimentation and real-world deployment—bringing up new boards, hacking fast on prototypes, and hardening systems for long-term reliability.

Our embedded development philosophy balances speed and rigor. We move fast on prototypes to unlock new capabilities, validate assumptions, and de-risk bold design choices, but we apply production-grade thinking from day one. Architecture before implementation, tight hardware–software co-design, deterministic behavior over clever shortcuts, and rapid iteration loops validated on real robots are core to how we work. Firmware is never a handoff—it is a living system, continuously shaped by mechanical constraints, electrical realities, autonomy requirements, manufacturing discipline, and operational feedback.

And above all, we design for both exploration and scale: the freedom to experiment on in-house robots, combined with the responsibility to deliver systems that are robust, safe, manufacturable, securely updateable, and cost-efficient at fleet scale. Our goal is not just to build impressive machines in the lab, but to turn breakthrough prototypes into reliable robots operating every day in real urban environments.