Full Job Description
We are looking for a 'working' Sustaining Firmware Manager to lead a team responsible for supporting and improving Arlo's existing products in the field. You will own the end-to-end sustaining lifecycle - from issue intake and triage through root cause analysis, fix development, and release delivery - ensuring our customers experience reliable, high-quality products.
Sustaining Firmware Manager
Location: Richmond, Canada/ Carlsbad, California/ Remote PST
Key Responsibilities
• Technical Leadership - Lead and mentor a team of firmware engineers responsible for sustaining and enhancing deployed home security camera products. Provide technical direction, conduct design and code reviews, and foster excellence in engineering.
• Firmware Ownership - Own the sustaining firmware lifecycle for camera and connected IoT products, including investigation, root cause analysis, firmware development, validation, and production release.
• Issue Management & Triage - Manage intake and prioritization of field issues from customer support, partners, manufacturing, and internal teams. Lead technical triage to quickly identify firmware, hardware, cloud, networking, or application-related issues.
• Root Cause Analysis & Debugging - Lead complex debugging efforts across embedded firmware, Linux-based systems, RTOS, device drivers, networking stacks, and cloud-connected IoT systems. Drive corrective actions that improve product reliability and customer experience.
• Monitoring & Observability - Establish dashboards, alerting, and health metrics to proactively detect field issues, monitor release rollouts, and drive instrumentation improvements to reduce time-to-root-cause.
• Release Planning & Delivery - Own release planning and execution, balancing severity, customer and business impacts to deliver timely fixes via fast-tracks or scheduled releases while maintaining release quality.
• Connectivity & Streaming Expertise - Participate in and oversee investigation and optimization of camera streaming performance, video/audio pipelines, wireless connectivity, and IoT networking protocols. Drive improvements related to streaming reliability, network performance, interoperability, and field robustness. Ensure robust software architecture, coding standards, automated testing, and maintainable code.
• Team Leadership - Manage a team of sustaining engineers focused on root cause analysis, fix development, test planning, and cross-platform impact assessment.
• Escalation Management - Own the technical escalation process, ensuring critical field issues are resolved within SLA with proper and effective cross-functional coordination.
• Systemic Issue Ownership - Drive long-term improvement initiatives for recurring systemic problems that require cross-org collaboration and sustained multi-release effort. Track MTTR and quality metrics.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration - Partner with customer support, QA, factory, and partner teams to ensure effective issue resolution and successful firmware releases, proper documentation and efficient handoffs.
Qualifications
• 5+ years of engineering management experience, preferably in embedded systems, firmware, or IoT product sustaining.
• 8+ years or embedded firmware development experience with RTOS and embedded Linux based multi-threading system
• Strong hands-on experience programming in C for embedded systems.
• Experience with WiFi networking, Bluetooth and IOT networking protocols, audio/video streaming technologies, and cloud-connected device ecosystems.
• Strong understanding of firmware development, debugging, and release processes.
• Experience managing bug triage, release trains, and escalation workflows at scale.
• Familiarity with tools such as Git, Jira, Confluence, Splunk, and Slack-based engineering workflows.
• Excellent leadership, communication and cross-functional collaboration skills - able to interface with CS, QA, factory, and partner teams.
• Data-driven mindset with experience tracking MTTR, defect trends, and release quality metrics.
Education
BS CS/EE/CE or relevant work experience (MS is a plus)
The pay range for this position reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries at commencement of employment. In the United States, the expected range is between USD$133,000 - 200,000 per year, and in Canada CAD$150,000 - 190,000 per year, plus equity. However, base pay offered may vary depending on multiple factors, including location, role, job-related knowledge, skills, relevant education and experience. The total compensation package for this position may also include other elements, including bonus, equity, and a full range of benefits. Details of all benefits will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.