Job Title: Senior Firmware Engineer, Implant Electronics

Location: San Francisco, CA

Type: Full-Time (on-site)

Level: L4 — Senior Engineer

Click here to apply

Coherence Neuro is a highly interdisciplinary neurotechnology company solving some of the most challenging biological and medical problems that remain unmet. Our goal is to develop technologies that significantly increase the quality and length of life for those with debilitating and deadly cancers in the brain and body. We are backed by the best global venture capital firms, and are scaling our team across multiple sites to bring our products to those who need it as quickly and safely as possible. If you're driven to push the boundaries of engineering and science and want to help build something that genuinely changes lives, we want to hear from you. We value diversity and encourage applicants from all backgrounds to join us in our mission. Learn about our team here!

We are seeking a Senior Firmware Engineer to own the embedded firmware and digital architecture of SOMA, our fully implantable therapeutic brain stimulation system, at our San Francisco office.

This role owns the code that runs inside the implant: the state machines that sequence therapy, the interlocks that keep it safe, and the telemetry that transfers data out of the implant. You will help set the implant's digital architecture, and build our firmware development lifecycle under IEC 62304. The ideal candidate is a hands-on embedded engineer who writes robust, low-power C for resource-constrained microcontrollers, thinks in failure modes, and has shipped firmware under a regulated process.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, implement and verify implant firmware: low-power state machines, stimulation sequencing, safety interlocks, and fault detection and handling.
• Lead the implant digital architecture trade study across power budget, determinism, radiation tolerance and development risk.
• Define and implement signal conditioning and data reduction for recorded and sensed data within the implant power budget.
• Own the implant uplink and downlink telemetry protocol stack (framing, error detection and correction, command and data handling) and the top-level implant state machine; define the interface with the physical layer.
• Implement secure, fail-safe firmware update: bootloader, image authentication and rollback.
• Establish the firmware lifecycle under IEC 62304: requirements, architecture, unit and integration testing, static analysis, configuration management and traceability; contribute software items to ISO 14971 risk analysis.
• Build hardware-in-the-loop test and debug tooling with the test systems engineer.
• Mentor engineers and review firmware and digital logic across the team.

Required Qualifications and Skills

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science or a related discipline; PhD with industry experience, or 6+ years of industry experience in embedded firmware development.
• Expert embedded C on resource-constrained, low-power microcontrollers, with experience choosing between bare-metal and RTOS architectures and justifying the choice.