Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. NRG Energy is committed to creating a smarter, cleaner, and more connected future through their subsidiary Vivint Smart Home, a leading smart home company. They are seeking a Senior Director of Embedded Engineering to lead teams in developing the software for various smart home devices, ensuring high-quality firmware and effective collaboration with hardware teams.
Responsibilities
- Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing organization of firmware and embedded Linux engineers across multiple device teams
- Build a team culture rooted in engineering excellence, reliability, and customer impact
- Define career paths, set performance expectations, and invest in the growth of every engineer
- Partner with recruiting to attract top embedded engineering talent
- Own the multi-year technical roadmap for Vivint's embedded software platform — spanning firmware, embedded Linux, OS/runtime, imaging and video pipelines, and connectivity stacks
- Set architectural standards that support scalability, security, and maintainability across a diverse and growing device portfolio
- Drive modern embedded development practices: CI/CD for software, automated testing, and reliable OTA update infrastructure at fleet scale
- Partner with Hardware Engineering on new product introductions: co-design system architectures, evaluate SoCs and image sensors, and drive hardware-software integration from concept through mass production
- Serve as the embedded software owner in shared-responsibility engagements with JDM and silicon vendors, including chipset evaluation for compute, video, and networking
- Work with Backend Engineering to define clean device-to-cloud interfaces, remote device management, and real-time data flows
- Set and enforce standards for firmware quality, stability, and security — including secure boot, code signing, and secure OTA update processes
- Drive down field defect rates through rigorous pre-production testing, staged rollout practices, and post-launch fleet health monitoring
Skills
- 10+ years of embedded software engineering experience, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles
- Deep expertise in camera and video systems, including image signal processing and video encoding pipelines
- Strong understanding of AI and computer vision requirements — edge inference constraints, model optimization tradeoffs, and hardware platform considerations — sufficient to drive platform decisions
- Hands-on experience with firmware development (bare-metal and/or RTOS) and embedded Linux
- Experience managing or closely collaborating on hardware bring-up, BSP development, and JDM/contract manufacturer relationships
- Proven ability to define and execute multi-year embedded platform roadmaps in a consumer or commercial device company
- B.S. in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related field
- Some travel required
- Experience in the smart home or connected-device industry
- Familiarity with imaging and video pipeline technologies (GStreamer, H.264/H.265, WebRTC, RTSP, HLS) and connectivity stacks (Z-Wave, Zigbee, Wi-Fi, BLE, Matter, MQTT)
- Familiarity with camera SoC platforms
- Hands-on experience integrating or deploying AI/ML models on embedded devices
- Experience with Yocto or similar embedded Linux build systems
- Experience with OpenWrt or similar for network device platforms
Benefits
- Paid holidays and flexible paid time away
- Employee/Friends/Family Discounts
- Medical/dental/vision/life coverage
- 401(k) + Employer Match
- Employee Resource Groups
- Annual Bonus
- Employee Stock Purchase Plan
- Quarterly Innovation Weeks
Company Overview
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