About the roleOur installed fleet is growing faster than our next-generation design can ship. The first-generation hardware has known electrical and integration limitations that show up in the field, and our core embedded team is focused on the long-term redesign.
We're looking for a Senior Embedded Field Reliability Engineer to own the health of today's installed units. Your mission: keep every deployed scanner alive and recoverable, reduce customer-facing issues, and feed real field data into the redesign. This is a sustaining role for someone who gets satisfaction from keeping an imperfect product working brilliantly in the field - not from starting over on a clean sheet. You'll partner closely with customer support and the embedded R&D team, and you'll spend real time on-site with customers.
What you'll do- Build and run field failure tracking: categorize failures, rates and root causes across the installed base.
- Reproduce and root-cause intermittent field failures from logs, telemetry and scope traces.
- Ship recoverability fixes without a board respin - hardware and software watchdogs, safe-mode boot, remote reset paths, A/B firmware with automatic rollback.
- Instrument devices with fleet telemetry to catch failures early, and push fixes safely to deployed units via OTA.
- Design and validate low-cost retrofits (e.g. power control or filtering) that a field tech can install in under 30 minutes.
- Write runbooks so support can recover units without escalating to engineering.
- Give R&D a prioritized, well-researched list of design issues, backed by field data.
- Travel to customer sites to diagnose issues and work directly with dealer service managers and our support team.
What we're looking for- 7+ years of hands-on embedded engineering experience at senior or staff level.
- Field failure analysis: you've reproduced intermittent failures in deployed hardware, root-caused them, and run an RMA or failure-tracking process.
- Recovery engineering: watchdogs, bootloaders, A/B firmware partitions with automatic rollback, and remote reset.
- Board-level hardware debugging: power sequencing, brownouts, grounding and EMI, thermal issues, and camera interfaces such as USB, PoE or GigE. Proficient with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, multimeters, and reading schematics and datasheets.
- Fleet telemetry and OTA updates on deployed devices.
- Embedded Linux and production C/C++, plus Python for test and diagnostic tooling.
- Customer-facing comfort: happy to travel to sites and explain issues clearly to non-technical people.
- Pragmatic, data-driven mindset: you start with failure rates, logs and power topology, and you ship workarounds quickly under time pressure.
Nice to have- Machine vision or multi-camera systems experience.
- You've designed a small retrofit board or field kit.
- Startup or small-team experience, comfortable without a big test lab.
- Automotive, dealership or industrial environment exposure.
- Experience using AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) to iterate quickly.
What success looks like- Field failures are tracked, categorized and quantified across the installed base.
- Recoverability fixes are live on deployed units without a board respin.
- Low-cost retrofits are validated and ready for field techs to install in under 30 minutes.
- Support can recover units using runbooks, without escalating to engineering.
- R&D has a prioritized, data-backed list of design issues for the next generation.
Salary band: $150-180k + equity
