Cowboy Space
Senior Platform Firmware Engineer
$170K–$235K
San Carlos, California · On-site · Senior · Full-time · Posted Sep 15, 2026
- Visa sponsorship
- Applicants must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State to meet ITAR export-control requirements.
About the job
Develop and maintain platform firmware, FPGA logic, and system management and recovery systems for custom compute hardware deployed in space.
What you'll do
- Develop platform firmware and board-management infrastructure; own hardware bring-up and low-level boot sequencing.
- Implement FPGA/CPLD logic, BMC firmware, and management interfaces; debug hardware/firmware interactions.
- Build fault recovery and autonomous reboot capabilities, and support secure boot, firmware updates, and system attestation.
What they ask for
- Hands-on experience in embedded systems, platform firmware, BMC development, or hardware bring-up engineering.
- Strong proficiency in C/C++ and Python.
- Deep understanding of platform initialization and boot architectures; familiarity with I2C, SPI, UART, GPIO, and JTAG.
- Experience debugging hardware/software interactions at board and system level; familiarity with FPGA or CPLD workflows using Xilinx or Altera.
Nice to have
- Experience with server platforms, AI infrastructure, or high-performance compute; familiarity with PCIe initialization and accelerator bring-up.
- Experience with remote management and fleet-scale telemetry, firmware security, or radiation-tolerant or fault-resilient systems.
Pay
$170,000 – $235,000 annually (base salary)
Tools
C/C++, Python, I2C, SPI, UART, GPIO, JTAG, OpenBMC
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative