Manager, Firmware Engineering

In today’s dynamic worksites, seamless collaboration between people and machines is essential. FORT’s platform ensures safe, secure, and dynamic control that surpasses legacy systems and next-generation AI capabilities. While autonomous machines offer significant advantages, they also introduce new safety challenges. FORT addresses these concerns by providing solutions such as the Wireless E-Stop, which allows operators to instantly stop any machine from a safe distance, enhancing safety during emergencies. Additionally, FORT’s Safe Remote Control enables operators to manage heavy machinery remotely, reducing the risk of accidents and improving visibility. By ensuring communications integrity across any network, FORT empowers customers to protect their most valuable assets—people, data, and machines—ensuring they remain safe and secure. This role is based in Philadelphia and works on a hybrid schedule, with a minimum of three days a week in the office. The Firmware Engineering Manager owns FORT’s firmware group end-to-end (its people, delivery, and technical health) while still building firmware directly. About half your time is hands-on embedded engineering, and half is leading through the team. You own the team’s development process directly, supported by the Program Management and Systems Engineering functions. You work in three directions: down and in on your team’s health and performance, up and out with a real engineering voice into Product and Program planning, and across to keep firmware coherent with the peer groups (cloud, hardware, systems, safety). Senior engineers on the team own the firmware architecture, and you make sure they have the direction, the standards, and the authority to do it well. Firmware sits closest to the safety layer FORT sells, so both the technical bar and the quality process have to be strong enough to carry that level of rigor while the team still delivers at pace. What will you own The hands-on half. You contribute directly to the embedded stack, much of it filling the gaps around the team, so the work keeps moving: Write and review production C/C++ for safety-critical embedded devices, taking well-scoped components through implementation, test, and release. Implement real-time firmware for RTOS targets (Zephyr/FreeRTOS) and bare-metal environments, along with Embedded Linux user-space applications. Bring up new hardware, debug hard problems with JTAG, GDB, oscilloscopes, and logic analyzers, and tune performance on constrained targets. Maintain and improve the firmware CI/CD pipelines (GitLab), the test automation behind them, and hardware-in-the-loop coverage. Pick up the work that would otherwise sit unclaimed in a given sprint, whether that is an unfinished integration, a stubborn defect, a driver or BSP task, or a gap left by a vacancy or a competing priority. The leadership half. You own the group and the way it works: Agile Scrum process end-to-end: backlog grooming, cadence and ceremonies, estimation, and forecasting. Technical health and feasibility of the backlog, advocate for platform and technical-debt work, and decline commitments that the team cannot feasibly deliver. Quality process: code review, testing standards, a real definition of done, and corrective retrospectives, strong enough to carry FORT’s safety-critical bar without depending on you as the personal backstop on every artifact. Workforce management: hiring, performance, and career conversations, team structure, and workload and burnout. Carry engineering’s opinion on technical direction, sequencing, and estimation into Product and Program forums, and surface cross-team integration risks early, particularly at the firmware boundaries with hardware, cloud, and systems. What you will be measured on Delivery predictability, quality, goal achievement, and retention, plus improvement over time in five team metrics: planning accuracy, estimation accuracy, velocity, defect escapes, and engagement. What we are looking for Solid, current embedded expertise across C and C++, RTOS, and Embedded Linux development, including hardware bring-up, low-level debugging, standard interfaces (UART, SPI, I2C, USB, CAN), IP networking, and Python for automation, with firsthand experience owning firmware CI/CD. Technical judgment strong enough to assess feasibility, estimation, and risk, and to shape or push back on commitments. Solid management capability across performance, development, and capacity planning, and comfort owning a team end-to-end with a broad scope and matching autonomy. The instinct to delegate real authority and build systems rather than becoming the bottleneck. Typically 6+ years of embedded software development with at least 2 years leading or managing engineers, and a B.S. in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent experience. Nice to have: a background in functional safety or another regulated industry (medical, automotive, aerospace, industrial).