Software Engineering Lead, Firmware/OS

About the role

You will own the end to end lifecycle of the core operating systems that power our hardened devices. This position requires you to design system-level components that are both mission critical and resource constrained. You will translate ambiguous operational requirements into secure and reliable firmware and OS solutions. Your work will directly determine the robustness and performance of platforms used in demanding industrial and defense environments. You will partner closely with hardware and field engineering teams to align software behavior with physical constraints. You will mentor engineers while maintaining a high bar for code quality and system integrity. Your decisions will shape how updates are delivered and how systems recover from failure in the field.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design, implement, and maintain system-level platform code across Android and Linux, including AOSP customizations, system services, init processes, and kernel modules.
• Architect scalable, extensible, secure, and robust systems. Lead a team to execute on those designs as requirements evolve.
• Develop and maintain Linux-based services for inter-device communications, message queuing, and observability pipelines.
• Interface with hardware teams to maintain drivers and integrate custom hardware and peripherals.
• Build and manage immutable system images, secure and reproducible environments, including certificate signing, sandboxing, and runtime hardening.
• Define, implement, and enforce system policy, network configurations, authentication, and enterprise integrations for Android and Linux-based devices.
• Align coding and deployment practices with regulatory and high-assurance frameworks.
• Collaborate across engineering disciplines (software, electrical, mechanical) to inform constraints and requirements.
• Ship pragmatic, secure, and well-documented systems that scale.
• Own the reliability, performance, and security of firmware and OS stacks throughout the product lifecycle.
• Guide code reviews, technical design discussions, and incident response for platform level issues.
• Establish best practices for build, test, and deployment automation for embedded systems.
• Drive the adoption of secure development workflows across multiple engineering teams.
• Participate in on call rotations to support critical production incidents.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and maintaining Android and/or Linux system-level code and framework extensions (AOSP, custom ROMs, HALs, device drivers, kernel configuration) in an enterprise environment.
• Strong software architecture fundamentals with the ability to design systems that are secure, scalable, extensible, and robust.
• Experience with networking fundamentals and low-latency communication protocols, both IPC and RPC (e.g., gRPC, protobuf, AIDL, libzmq).
• Experience integrating custom hardware and peripherals into Android and Linux environments.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for system image generation, AOSP builds, and firmware packaging.
• Familiarity with automated testing strategies for embedded and system-level software, including hardware-in-the-loop and integration testing.
• Experience with OTA update infrastructure, including image delivery, staged rollouts, and rollback mechanisms.
• Familiarity with secure boot, TPM, certificate chains, system integrity verification, and other low-level security primitives.
• A security-first mindset with practical experience hardening real-world systems.
• Experience working on devices and systems with resource constraints (thermal, power, compute).
• Effective communication and collaboration across engineering disciplines.
• Ability to read, understand, and modify low level system code in C, C++, and related assembly where relevant.
• Willingness to work within U.S. export control and security regulations due to the nature of the business.

Nice to have

• Experience with defense-related security frameworks and protocols (ITAR, security classifications, STIG, encryption).
• Distributed systems experience, including service discovery, health monitoring, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation across multi-node systems.

Practical notes

Work Authorization Requirement: Due to the nature of our business and compliance with federal regulations, all candidates must be a "U.S. Person". Upon hire, you will be required to provide documentation verifying your status as a U.S. Citizen, a lawful permanent resident, or a protected individual under 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3).

Compensation may vary within the posted range based on relevant experience, skills, education, and other job-related factors. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for equity and other forms of compensation. Eligible employees also receive a competitive benefits package, including unlimited PTO.

Rivet is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any characteristics protected by applicable law.