Engineering · Santa Clara, California (on-site) · Full-time

Embedded engineer, automotive runtime

Build AREN — model execution, update, and lifecycle on heterogeneous automotive NPUs, with budgets a safety reviewer can hold us to.


title: Embedded engineer, automotive runtime location: Santa Clara, California (on-site) team: Engineering employment: Full-time posted: 2026-08-03 summary: Build AREN — model execution, update, and lifecycle on heterogeneous automotive NPUs, with budgets a safety reviewer can hold us to.

About the role

You will build AREN, our automotive runtime: the layer that executes learned workloads on vehicle silicon, keeps them updated over the air, and manages their lifecycle across hardware generations. Neural audio is the first workload; the contract you design is what every later workload inherits.

Expect to be the person in the room who can talk about NPU schedulers, memory partitioning, and update-path integrity in the same conversation.

What you would work on

  • Execution backends for heterogeneous automotive NPUs behind one workload contract
  • Deterministic scheduling for audio-rate workloads on silicon designed around vision frame rates
  • Partitioning and fail-safe paths — the limiter and budgets that make learned components reviewable
  • Over-the-air model update and rollback machinery that survives an OEM integration review
  • Trace and debug infrastructure that is credible on a vehicle rig, not only on a bench

What we expect

  • Substantial embedded or automotive systems experience, ideally with at least one shipped vehicle program
  • Strong C and C++ on resource-constrained targets, and comfort with an RTOS
  • Working familiarity with functional-safety practice in software — the discipline, whether or not the badge
  • Experience with at least one NPU or accelerator toolchain, and the scars to prove it

What we do not require

A specific silicon vendor background. We care that you can learn the next toolchain, because there will be a next toolchain.

Logistics

  • On-site in Santa Clara, California
  • Full-time, full benefits
  • Compensation is competitive. Exact bands on request.