Engineering Manager – Camera Firmware Platform

About the Team

The Camera Firmware Platform team owns the foundation that every Verkada camera runs on. While our product firmware teams bring new camera categories to market, this team makes every camera in the fleet, both existing and future models, more reliable, faster, leaner, and more power-efficient.

• Edge Storage: We own the on-camera storage stack that turns every Verkada camera into a self-contained recording device. Our mandate is reliable, accessible, secure, and observable storage of customer video.
• Firmware Platform: We own the cross-cutting firmware systems underneath every camera feature: boot and shutdown, memory and power management, system state orchestration, IPC, observability, and firmware update.

About the Role

As the Engineering Manager for Camera Firmware Platform, you will lead a highly technical team of storage and embedded systems engineers responsible for the reliability, performance, power, and stability of firmware running on a fleet of more than 1.8 million perpetually online devices. You will set the storage and platform roadmap, decide which fleet-wide investments matter most, and turn them into measurable improvements in footage retention, storage endurance, boot time, memory headroom, power draw, and crash rates.

Responsibilities

Lead the team

• Lead and grow a team of storage, firmware, and systems engineers, and recruit and retain top-tier embedded talent.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, career development, and execution management.
• Define the technical vision and multi-quarter roadmap for camera storage and firmware platform.
• Establish engineering best practices around testing, observability, incident response, root-cause analysis, and long-term maintainability.

Drive storage optimizations

• Own the on-camera storage stack end to end, including filesystems (ext4, UBIFS), video layout and indexing, SD/eMMC drivers, and raw NAND.
• Guarantee footage integrity through power loss, filesystem corruption, and failing media.
• Build deep storage observability of SD and NAND health, erase counts, bad blocks, UBI counters, writes per hour, and retention metrics.
• Build hardware-in-the-loop testing for storage disaster cases.
• Partner with Hardware teams and external flash vendors to qualify next-generation storage media.
• Guide the evolution of storage-adjacent backend systems for retention, cloud backup, archives, and storage health notifications.

Drive firmware platform improvements

• Optimize boot and shutdown paths across the boot stack, kernel, userspace services, and backend connection.
• Optimize memory, power, and network on resource-constrained embedded devices.
• Orchestrate device-level state transitions (system/service restarts, OTA, DSP pipeline restart, commissioning/decommissioning).
• Add core dumps and stack traces for crashes, reliable IPC message delivery, power-on self-tests, and system-wide log levels.
• Improve build and kernel tooling, remote serial/flashing access, AI-assisted code review, and release automation.

Operate at fleet scale

• Own fleet-wide reliability metrics for retention, storage health, crash rates, memory pressure, boot time, and power.
• Find and fix issues before customers notice them using diagnostic fleet data.

Requirements

• BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience in embedded or systems software, including 2+ years leading or managing high-performing systems, storage, platform, or infrastructure teams.
• Experience designing storage systems for continuous, high-throughput write workloads (such as video recording).
• Strong expertise in systems programming in C/C++.
• Hands-on experience profiling and optimizing system-level performance, memory, and power on resource-constrained devices.
• Experience designing concurrent userspace services and IPC mechanisms (shared memory, sockets, message queues).
• Experience debugging complex OS or storage issues in production across large deployed fleets.
• Demonstrated success driving technical strategy and aligning multiple teams around shared platform investments.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to influence technical direction across Hardware, Firmware, Backend, and Product.
• Willingness and ability to work onsite five days per week in San Mateo, CA.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with Go or other higher-level languages.
• Experience with Linux kernel fundamentals and device drivers.
• Experience with storage fundamentals: NAND flash behavior, filesystem fault tolerance, SD/eMMC protocols, partition tables, write amplification, and power-loss protection.
• Experience with camera or video SoCs (e.g., Ambarella), ISP/DSP pipelines, or video encoding.
• Experience building firmware update, fleet observability, or device management systems for millions of IoT devices.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and backend systems.
• Experience with hard drives and RAID (e.g., mdadm, ZFS), SMART monitoring, or building NAS/NVR products.