SeniorStaff Firmware Engineer

About Us

Were Queue the worlds first fully autonomous robotic pharmacy. We go from sealed wholesale bottles to filled verified prescription vials with zero human involvement.

We built Queue because no one should ever have to wait in line for the medicines they need. One in three US pharmacies has shut down. Pharmacists are overworked to a breaking point. And patients are paying the price. Queue fixes that. Pharmacists get to practice pharmacy again counseling patients catching interactions doing the work only they can do. And patients get their prescriptions in 60 seconds or less any time anywhere.

Were backed by over $18 million from Alleycorp Riot Ventures Ubiquity Ventures House Capital and others who believe the pharmacy system is broken and that robotics can fix it. Queue was founded by Nick Desai (6x founder previously CEO of Heal) and Joshua Liu (previously Tesla Waymo and Zipline).

We build physical robots that handle Schedule II narcotics. Patient safety is non-negotiable and it starts in the firmware.

About the Role

You own the firmware that physically moves the medication. This is the bare-metal / RTOS software on the motor-control microcontroller inside the robot the layer below the edge agent where a command becomes motion a sensor becomes a decision and a safety interlock is the difference between the right dose and a patient-safety event.

You own the firmware side of the PreScript interface the wire protocol the edge agent (Rust on Jetson-class hardware) uses to drive the dispense mechanism and everything below it: motor control loops sensor acquisition and cross-checking timing-critical actuation and the on-device safety gates that make an unsafe dispense structurally impossible rather than merely unlikely.

This posting covers Senior and Staff levels. Which one you land at is set by scope and impact a Senior engineer owns hard subsystems end-to-end; a Staff engineers work changes how the whole team operates. You work directly with Josh (CTO) on the motor-control and hardware interface and report to the Head of Software Engineering on architecture and cross-boundary integration with the edge agent.

What Youll Own

• Motor control Closed-loop actuation of the dispensing mechanism: PWM/DMA drive current sensing stall detection and the timing budgets that keep motion precise and safe.

• The PreScript firmware interface The firmware side of the wire protocol with the edge agent. You own the contract the framing and the failure behavior when the link drops mid-dispense.

• Sensor acquisition & cross-check Read filter and independently cross-check the signals that confirm a dispense happened correctly. No critical signal is trusted on a single source.

• On-firmware safety Interlocks and state machines that fail closed: the code path to actuate does not exist without confirmed verified state. Watchdogs brown-out behavior safe-state on fault.

• Firmware observability Structured logging to nonvolatile memory that survives a reset health/diagnostic reporting the fleet can read and the firmware-level signals that feed fleet KPIs. If the device cant prove it behaved correctly it didnt.

• Hardware bring-up & debugging Board bring-up driver work and the kind of debugging that needs a scope and a logic analyzer including chasing silicon errata to ground truth when the bug could be on either side of the wire.

First 90 Days

• Day 30: Understand the motor-control firmware and the PreScript interface. First PR to a driver or a safety state machine. Paired with the CTO on the hardware interface. You can explain the dispense lifecycle and the firmware safety invariants.

• Day 60: Own a subsystem end-to-end (motor control or sensor acquisition cross-check). Firmware observability improved a field failure produces enough evidence to diagnose it remotely. Hardware-in-loop tests expanded.

• Day 90: A full dispense driven through your firmware on real hardware with the safety interlocks and cross-checks proven under fault injection. Every critical signal is cross-checked; every fault has a defined safe state and a runbook.

What Were Looking For

Must-Have

• 5 years embedded / firmware bare-metal and/or RTOS in C/C and/or Rust shipped to production hardware.

• Motor / motion control PWM timers DMA current sensing control loops. You reason in timing budgets not just function calls.

• Microcontroller depth ARM Cortex-M (STM32 or similar): interrupts DMA clock trees peripherals. Youve read a datasheet and an errata sheet to ground truth.

• Safety-critical systems youve built firmware where failure has physical consequences (medical automotive avionics robotics industrial). Fail-closed is a reflex not a checklist.

• State machines you design in states and transitions and can reason about every edge including the fault edges.

Important

• Hardware/software debugging scope logic analyzer JTAG/SWD.

• Serial / hardware interfaces UART SPI I2C RS485 TCP protobuf or similar custom wire protocols.

• Real-time reasoning deadlines jitter priority inversion worst-case timing.

• Firmware observability logging that survives a reset remote diagnostics fault forensics from the field.

Nice-to-Have

• Power electronics / gate-driver debugging.

• Jetson / embedded Linux adjacency.

• Robotics: sensor fusion motion planning control theory.

• Healthcare or other regulated / audited industry experience.

How We Hire

• Recruiter Screen (30 min)

• Technical Interview (90 min) a take-home walkthrough plus a live design exercise; we fix and improve together and talk through operational and safety thinking.

• Design Interview (60 min) we go deeper on a control/observability subsystem: how it fails how youd know and how you make the bad state impossible.

• Leadership Interview (60 min) culture mission and long-term fit.

What We Offer

• Early-stage equity in automated pharmacy dispensing at scale

• Direct impact your firmware physically safely moves medication for real patients

• Small team zero bureaucracy high trust

• Hard problems: safety-critical firmware real-time hardware integration regulatory compliance

Compensation & Benefits

• Competitive salary

• Meaningful early-stage equity

• Health 401(k) unlimited PTO

Why Join Us Now

Impact & Growth

• Direct Patient Impact: Your firmware will improve healthcare outcomes for millions of patients

• Market Leadership: Ground-floor opportunity to define an entirely new category of healthcare technology

• Technical Innovation: Genuinely novel problems at the intersection of AI robotics and healthcare

• Career Acceleration: High-visibility role with significant growth potential as the company scales

Team and Culture

• World-Class Team: Work alongside exceptional engineers AI researchers and healthcare experts

• Direct Access: Work directly with the CTO on the hardware interface with real autonomy and influence

• Innovation Focus: Culture that prioritizes breakthrough thinking and rapid experimentation

• Mission-Driven: United around transforming healthcare through technology

Our Values

• Servant Leadership: Make those around you better. We serve our teams the way Queue serves communities: 4000 pharmacies close each year and deserts are spreading - were here to reverse that.

• Do the Hard Things: Healthcare hardware and company-building are all hard. We do them anyway. Convenience for us is life-changing for those we serve.

• Own Your Work: Be accountable; take pride in what you ship. Queue lives and dies by what you do - own it fully.

• Default is Now: Theres never a better time than today. Default to action: what can we prove learn or simplify right now

Contact: If you have any questions please contact us at

Required Experience:

Staff IC