This was an embedded software at a relatively small stealth startup developing a new hardware product. This was a significant change of pace relative to my previous roles - in part because of the company size, and in part because it allowed me to dive into lower-level firmware development for the first time in many years.

Notable projects:

* Developed a bootloader / IAP to enable updating firmware for an STM32 device over a network (ethernet / WiFi). This allowed rapid, convenient deployment of firmware updates that previously required physically connecting a programmer / debugger to a JTAG interface.

* Worked around a restrictive build system to enable linking applications against arbitrary BSP targets, whereas they were previously coupled one-to-one. This eliminated significant code duplication and associated maintenance burden.

* Brought up a new hardware system involving two STM32 devices communicating over ethernet. Collaborated with electronics engineers to diagnose hardware issues, provided test software to validate core functionality, completed core application development and iterated on the interface and system behavior based on user feedback during testing.

In this role, I worked on Embedded Robot Middleware with Zoox's Software Core team. My teammates and I were responsible for the design and implementation of robotics-oriented middleware for various embedded platforms ranging from powerful SoCs to relatively resource-constrained microcontrollers.

This infrastructure included real-time application frameworks and associated libraries that provide message passing, logging, reproducible playback, performance metrics, system diagnostics, and other tools for system introspection. Of these areas, I led a small group focused on messaging infrastructure, where we work on the implementation, configuration, and integration of various transports and messaging middleware to provide performant inter-thread/process/host communication for Zoox’s robot.

For my first few years at Zoox, I worked on Drive Systems in the Firmware Applications team. In this role, I helped design, implement, and test embedded software pertaining to the control of various drive-related subsystems of Zoox's autonomous vehicle, such as the motors, steering racks, and brakes.

This role gave me a chance to explore application-level real-time software development utilizing modern C++ features as well as object-oriented, generic, and functional programming paradigms. I collaborated with vehicle engineers, safety engineers, and controls engineers to help bring Zoox's vehicle to life. I learned a lot about various automotive systems and safety-critical embedded software development in general, significantly expanding on the scope of my previous role at Tesla.