Senior Firmware Engineer

Brooklyn, NY – Onsite

Caladan Bio is looking for a Senior Firmware Engineer to design and build the embedded software architecture for our highly-integrated reactor systems. You’ll bring up, test, and troubleshoot new hardware, and be hands-on through system validation and manufacturing.

Caladan Bio is automating the process of bringing synthetic biology products to market. We're building the infrastructure (automated hardware, software, and AI) to power the future of biomanufacturing - starting on the benchtop in the earliest stages of R&D and partnering with companies through scale-up. Our flagship product, the Caladan 250, is a high performance benchtop bioreactor system that is enabling our customers to run double the number of experiments.

At Caladan we believe that the future of biomanufacturing will be driven by advancements that span the entire tech stack from genomics all the way through AI and robotics. The dynamic of the problem set we are tackling presents unique challenges, but also opportunities for outsized impact on an industry that will bring the most important technological advancements to our society over the next 100 years.

Caladan is based in Brooklyn, NY, and is backed by venture firms Lerer Hippeau, Wireframe VC, Twelve Below and Collaborative Fund.

What You’ll Do

• Own Caladan’s embedded software architecture and development.
• Define and bring up new embedded systems from initial specification to production.
• Help shape Caladan’s software development practices.
• Design, implement, debug, test, and document reliable firmware in C++/Rust for 32-bit ARM microcontrollers.
• Help develop and maintain our deployed Linux environments. Write embedded Linux software to manage hardware subsystems. Architect and build APIs between firmware subsystems, embedded Linux, and backend software.
• Work closely with hardware and software engineers on system bring-up, debugging, testing, and manufacturing. Support customer teams with deployed units.
• Build tooling, metrics, and monitoring to support both early-stage evaluation and scaled deployment.

What You’ll Bring

• Ability to work onsite full-time in our Brooklyn, NY headquarters.
• Strong software engineering skills, with proficiency in Python and at least one of C/C++/Rust. We use Python for embedded, tooling, and backend; and are moving to a real-time Rust runtime.
• Experience developing bare-metal or RTOS embedded systems in C/C++/Rust for hardware products deployed to end-users.
• Experience bringing up new hardware platforms. Comfortable reading schematics and layouts to debug using tools like oscilloscopes and logic analyzers.

Nice to Have, but Not Required

• Exposure to biotech, lab automation, or scientific instrumentation.
• Experience at a startup or building products from scratch.
• Experience with Rust, in any context (embedded or otherwise).
• Experience with Linux devops (embedded or otherwise).
• Experience with embedded debugging (coredumps, traces).
• Experience in other parts of the software development stack (backend, frontend, devops) or hardware development (electrical, mechanical, manufacturing).

What’s in it for You

• Early role on a fast-moving, mission-driven hardware team.
• Work on real products solving meaningful problems.
• Medical, vision, and dental coverage.
• Competitive compensation: salary range for this role is $140,000-$180,000 plus equity.