Firmware Engineer

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.

What You’ll Do

• 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.

What You’ll Bring

Required

• 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.

Nice to Have

• Direct experience with Electric Imp OS and Squirrel.

• Experience with ESP32 and modern embedded toolchains (ESP-IDF, FreeRTOS).

• Experience with cloud IoT infrastructure — AWS IoT Core, device shadows, OTA pipelines, telemetry ingestion — even at a contributing rather than owning level.

• Familiarity with web technologies both front end and back end as well as databases — Typescript, React, Flask, Go, SQL

• Manufacturing and factory tooling: Experience building or supporting the systems that flash, provision, and verify firmware on the production line, and debugging them remotely with overseas manufacturing partners across time zones.

• Hardware-adjacent skills: For example, ability to read schematics and PCB layouts, comfort on a bench with an oscilloscope and logic analyzer, ability to spec an alternate component, basic familiarity with switch-mode power supplies.

• Experience working in a connected consumer product or food-tech company.

Who You Are

• 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.

Location

This role is hybrid with a strong preference for candidates based in or near Chicago, IL (HQ) or Urbana, IL (The Product Manufactory, our R&D and prototyping shop). For the right candidate, primarily remote work is possible, provided you have your own electronics bench and equipment.

Compensation & Benefits