Staff Embedded Software Engineer

Company Overview

Mainspring Energy is revolutionizing power generation with the world’s most flexible and adaptable onsite power generator, the Mainspring Linear Generator. Commercial, industrial, and utility leaders are choosing Mainspring over traditional options like engines, turbines, and fuel cells to quickly and reliably deliver local power for EV charging, commercial facilities, data centers, and grid-scale operations. The Mainspring Linear Generator is fuel flexible, ramps up and down to meet demand, and utilizes a flameless technology with near-zero NOx emissions.

Backed by top-tier investors such as Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, American Electric Power, and Lightrock, Mainspring designs, manufactures and delivers its products to customers across the U.S. today, and we’re quickly scaling for international expansion.

Inspired by our vision of the affordable, reliable, net-zero carbon grid, Mainspring is rapidly expanding within the $816B global electricity equipment market, and we’re hiring the best talent to meet growing customer demand around the globe. We welcome a broad range of backgrounds, experiences, and talents to bring fresh perspectives and ongoing innovation to our customers.

We are looking to build relationships with people who share our values:

Pragmatic Optimism. Building a new category of world-class power generation requires the optimism of ambition and creativity, balanced with practicality to solve problems efficiently. The challenges that arise are opportunities for growth.

Excellence without Ego. We bring expertise and commitment to creating the best customer experience, from sales to deployment and service, just as we apply deep technical rigor to building and delivering world-class products. We strive for excellence and behave as leaders with the humility to acknowledge our challenges, both collectively and as individual contributors.

Proactive Collaboration. The integration and cross-disciplinary nature of Mainspring’s business requires intentionally seeking out others who bring different skills, perspectives, and priorities. Our culture of inclusion and respect extends beyond our team to interactions with our partners and customers.

More information can be found at

Job Overview

This is a software engineering role with emphasis on embedded systems.

In the first week, you will close your first issue and review a colleague's merge-request.

In the first month, you will deliver your first driver for a new piece of hardware.

In the first year, you will contribute to the creation of our next generation architecture to enable continued expansion of our suite of sensors and actuators.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain embedded software in C, C++ and Python.
• Lead the successful development of embedded software for various components in the system
• Mentor junior members of the team
• Invent communication protocols for use by in-house designed I/O devices
• Select computer and network hardware to balance our performance needs vs. cost
• Write emulators and unit-tests for continuous integration
• Collaborate with Controls and Electrical to drive integrated hardware/software projects from initial research through to product release
• Set up and maintain build environments, cross-compilation toolchains, and CI pipelines
• Perform code reviews, unit testing, and integration testing
• Contribute to the definition of processes and best-practices for the overall software development life cycle

Critically, you should enjoy doing these things collaboratively as part of a tightly-coupled and highly interactive team.

If you consider things you enjoy, you might be caught:

• Building your own custom PC or your own home IoT system off a Raspberry Pi
• Running an LLM on your local GPU
• Contributing to /r/embedded
• Sharing your experience with programming paradigms and best practices, and picking your colleagues brains for theirs
• Letting the smoke out of some ICs (well… maybe not enjoy, but it has to happen sometimes!)
• Working with people on finding and implementing solutions for complex problems

Qualifications

• 12+ years experience programming for embedded hardware systems including design, implementation, architecture, and testing (real-time a plus)
• Expert proficiency in C/C++
• Strong Python coding skills
• Proven experience with Linux kernel builds, customization, and debugging
• Hands-on experience with build systems, cross-compilation, and CI/CD workflows
• Strong understanding of software architecture and interface design in embedded environments
• Basic knowledge of electrical engineering fundamentals to support low level debugging
• Passion for software engineering best practices
• Experience with Docker for embedded development and deployment workflows
• Drive to deliver complete software on time

$161,000 - $189,000 a year

This position is onsite at our Menlo Park HQ. The salary will be adjusted to reflect local market conditions based on employee location as well as the experience of the employee. Along with the base salary, Mainspring offers pre-IPO stock options + benefits.

Does your experience not meet all of our posted requirements? Studies have shown that some people are less likely to apply to positions unless they meet every listed requirement. At Mainspring, we are committed to building a diverse, inclusive, flexible, and collaborative environment, so if you want to help us transition the world to clean and affordable electricity, and don’t meet all posted requirements for a particular role, we’d still love to hear from you. Mainspring can sometimes be flexible enough to shift responsibilities for the right person, or otherwise identify open or upcoming roles that may better fit your professional background.

In more traditional words, Mainspring Energy, Inc is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.

This compensation and benefits information is based on Mainspring Energy's estimate as of the date of publication and may be modified in the future. We generally do not negotiate on salary once we have made an offer. The level of pay within the range will depend on a variety of job-related factors that may include location, relevant prior experience and/or education, or particular skills and expertise. New hires joining the company tend to be paid within the starting base pay range noted above, with opportunities to increase pay over time based on development of additional skills, competencies, and company-specific knowledge.