Job Description
About Human Archive Human Archive is a research lab focused on modeling human embodied intelligence. Humans are the most sophisticated biological systems we have ever observed, yet we still do not fully understand ourselves. Research into human physical intelligence — including the human hand, proprioception, and vision — remains largely unsolved. Our mission is to recover human embodied intelligence as a learned model. To achieve this, we build custom hardware products, deploy them globally at scale, and publish research. Today, our data is used for robotics and world modeling, but the broader opportunity is advancing scientific research into intelligence itself. Founded by Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers, we are lean, deeply technical, and operate at extreme speed, taking on unglamorous and conventionally impossible problems that directly unlock step-function gains in model capability. The deployment of capable humanoids at scale will permanently redefine human labor. Undesirable physical work will disappear, and human effort will shift toward a new era of abundant creativity. We are building the infrastructure to accelerate that transition by assembling the Human Archive mafia. You will own meaningful systems from day one and see your work directly impact model capabilities. This is a once-in-a-generation inflection point. If you want to help reshape physical labor and work on problems that matter at civilizational scale, join us. The Opportunity As a Firmware Engineer at Human Archive, you will build the embedded systems powering the hardware products used to model human embodied intelligence by owning the realtime firmware layer behind our wearable sensing systems — including deterministic sensor acquisition, timestamp alignment, system state control, and communication between microcontrollers and embedded Linux compute. This is a hands-on, execution-focused role centered around realtime embedded systems, multimodal sensing infrastructure, and low-level hardware integration. You’ll work across distributed sensor systems, synchronization pipelines, embedded compute, and deployment constraints while maintaining high standards of reliability, timing accuracy, and system stability across real-world environments. Your work will help shape the hardware products frontier labs and leading robotics companies use to collect data and train their models, transforming physical labor markets and economies while contributing to broader research into human embodied intelligence. What You’ll Do Design and maintain firmware for MCUs responsible for multimodal sensor acquisition and aggregation Build synchronization and timestamping systems across distributed sensing hardware Develop realtime communication systems between MCUs and embedded Linux compute Implement boot, shutdown, watchdog, and fault-recovery systems for deployment reliability Develop low-level hardware control systems for sensors, user inputs, and system indicators Optimize timing reliability, buffering, latency, and data throughput across sensing systems Debug firmware, hardware, power, and communication issues using lab instrumentation and real-world deployments What We’re Looking For 3–6 years of embedded firmware development experience Strong proficiency in C or C++ for embedded and MCU environments Experience with STM32 or similar MCU platforms Deep understanding of SPI, I2C, UART, interrupts, and realtime system design Experience building timing-sensitive firmware and deterministic data pipelines Hands-on debugging experience with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and embedded lab tools Experience with synchronized multi-sensor systems, robotics, drones, motion capture, or wearable hardware is a strong plus Familiarity with battery-powered systems, embedded Linux, and field-deployable hardware is a plus