Embedded Engineer
1 openingAbout the role
Ci4 builds autonomous platforms and the AI autonomy stack that runs them, for maritime and land missions where the work is complex, dangerous, or too repetitive for crewed operations. Our Autonomous Surface Vessels (ASVs) operate for long durations in salt water, sea state, and poor comms — which means the electronics and firmware underneath the autonomy stack have to be simple, observable, and hard to kill. You will join the embedded team as a hands-on engineer working across firmware, board bring-up, and vehicle integration. This is a build-and-test role: you will spend real time at the bench with a scope and a logic analyzer, and real time on the water or at the dock with a vessel that has to come back. We expect you to be early in your career — what matters is that you have actually built and debugged embedded hardware, not just studied it. What you will work on: - Write and maintain firmware in C/C++ on ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers for vessel subsystems: motor and thruster control, power distribution and battery monitoring, navigation lights and payload switching, sensor interfaces. - Bring up new PCBs from first power-on: verify rails, clocks, and resets, debug the parts that do not work, and feed fixes back into the next revision. - Implement and debug communication between boards and to the vehicle compute stack — CAN, RS-485/NMEA 0183/2000, UART, SPI, I2C, and Ethernet. - Support FPGA-based subsystems (Lattice/Xilinx class parts) used for sensor timing, high-rate data capture, and interface glue; write and simulate HDL modules under the guidance of senior engineers. - Build the test fixtures, HIL rigs, and bench scripts that let us regression-test firmware without putting a boat in the water. - Contribute to schematic review and simple board layouts in KiCad or Altium, with an eye toward marine realities: conformal coating, connector sealing, thermal paths, and EMI from high-current motor drives. - Instrument and log — add the telemetry, fault codes, and watchdog behavior that make a failure at sea explainable afterward. - Join integration and on-water test events: rig the vessel, run the checklist, capture data, and close the loop on defects. You will work closely with the autonomy, mechanical, and systems teams. Expect code review, expect to be asked why a design works, and expect to be trusted with a subsystem of your own within your first few months.
What we're looking for
Required: - Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or equivalent hands-on experience. - 0-2 years of professional experience; strong internship, research, or personal project work counts. - Working proficiency in C or C++ on bare-metal or RTOS-based microcontrollers. - Demonstrated experience debugging real hardware: reading schematics, using an oscilloscope and logic analyzer, probing signals, isolating faults between firmware and board. - Familiarity with common embedded buses (UART, SPI, I2C, CAN) and how they fail in practice. - Comfort with Linux, Git, and Python for tooling and test scripts. - Willingness to travel for on-water and field testing, and to work outdoors and around boats. - Must be eligible to work on defense programs and obtain any required security clearance. Nice to have: - FPGA exposure: Verilog or VHDL, simulation, and vendor toolchains (Vivado, Lattice Radiant/Diamond, Quartus). - Schematic capture and PCB layout experience in KiCad or Altium, including a board you took from design to working hardware. - Motor control experience — BLDC/FOC, ESCs, or high-current power electronics. - Exposure to ROS 2, MAVLink, or other robotics middleware. - Experience with marine, automotive, aerospace, or other ruggedized environments. - Battery management systems, power budgeting, or low-power design for long-endurance platforms. - Any competitive robotics, RoboBoat/RoboSub, Formula SAE, CubeSat, or similar team experience.
About Ci4
Building Intelligent, Unmanned Platforms - Ci4 builds autonomous platforms and the AI autonomy stack that runs them to handle complex, dangerous or repetitive tasks. Our solutions span a range of applications in the maritime and land domains.
- Employment type
- Full-time
- Job function
- Engineering
- Location
- Bengaluru
- Experience
- 1–2 yrs
- Openings
- 1