Senior Firmware Engineer, Implant Electronics
Full-time
San Francisco, CA, USA
Posted on Sep 30, 2026
Job Title: Senior Firmware Engineer, Implant Electronics
Location: San Francisco, CA
Type: Full-Time (on-site)
Level: L4 — Senior Engineer
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.
Experience designing event-driven state machines, interrupt-driven drivers and ultra-low-power sleep/wake schemes, with power measured and optimized on real hardware.
Experience writing safety-critical firmware: watchdogs, fault handling, defensive programming and defined safe states.
Has developed firmware under IEC 62304 or a comparable safety-critical standard (e.g. IEC 61508, ISO 26262, DO-178C software standards), including requirements traceability, verification and configuration management.
Comfortable at the bench: reading schematics, using oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, and bringing up new hardware.
Demonstrated technical leadership: owning a subsystem with minimal oversight, defining requirements with technical leads, and mentoring peers.
Bonus Skills
FPGA design in Verilog or VHDL for low-power applications.
Embedded DSP: filtering, compression, event or spike detection.
Radiation effects on electronics (TID, SEU) and mitigation (EDAC, memory scrubbing, redundancy).
Secure boot and cryptography on constrained devices.
Firmware for active implantable devices or wirelessly powered systems.
Reporting Structure:
The SOMA electrical engineering team has a flat structure. This role reports directly to the VP of Product Engineering and Manufacturing and works as a peer alongside the senior leads.
Benefits:
Healthcare, dental and vision
401k with company match
Industry leading paid time off (PTO) - 20 days/year + federal holidays
Daily meals and snacks provided on site
Professional development support and training opportunities.
Flexible working hours and travel opportunities (We have sites in Australia, UK and US!)
A chance to work on impactful, life-changing technologies in a dynamic, innovative environment.
