Embedded Software Engineer, Platform

About Hark

Hark is an artificial intelligence company building advanced, personalized intelligence. One that is proactive, multimodal, and capable of interacting with the world through speech, text, vision, and persistent memory.

We're pairing that intelligence with next-generation hardware to create a universal interface between humans and machines. While today's AI largely operates through chat boxes and decade-old devices, Hark is focused on what comes next: agentic systems that interact naturally with people and the real world.

To get there, we're developing multimodal models and next-generation AI hardware together - designed from the ground up as a single, unified interface for a new era of intelligent systems.

About the Role

The Embedded Software team owns the software running on Hark’s next generation of AI hardware, and we are looking for an Embedded Software Engineer, Platform to own the OS platform layer of it. You will design, configure, maintain, and optimize the OS platform services, the user space services and daemons above them, and the protocols that connect the device to our backend.

This is the platform end of the embedded spectrum: services, frameworks, virtualization, and protocol work on top of a complex multi-core SoC, in addition to driver and MCU work. You will partner closely with the BSP, embedded software, UX, and backend teams, and with the AI teams whose models run on the platform you build.

Responsibilities

• Design, configure, maintain, and optimize the OS platform services on Hark devices
• Build system services and daemons, frameworks, and networking primitives and protocols
• Own backend integrations, including protocol design and the performance analysis behind it
• Build and maintain virtualization frameworks and multi-OS system design, with the performance analysis to back it
• Profile and tune the platform for performance and power across the full multi-core system
• Partner with BSP, embedded software, UX, and backend teams so platform services, device software, and services land together

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional embedded software development experience on shipping hardware products
• Proficiency in C, C++, or Rust
• Deep understanding of computer architecture and operating system fundamentals
• Experience building OS services, frameworks and platform software on embedded systems
• Experience with one or more of: Unix or BSD Linux, VxWorks, QNX, or other modern operating systems
• Experience with performance and power optimization
• Familiarity with open source IoT frameworks such as MQTT, RabbitMQ, or CoAP
• Experience building systems on modern,, multi-core SoCs
• Familiarity with embedded toolchains and cross-compilation

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience with networking and connectivity, including wireless stacks
• Experience with constrained system architectures and MCUs
• Experience with hardware accelerators and inference runtimes (e.g. ONNX, TensorFlow)
• Experience with agentic frameworks
• Linux kernel contributions or deep kernel-adjacent platform work
• Development experience with DSP audio or camera ISP

Compensation

The US base salary range for this full-time position is between $120,000 - $300,000 annually.

The pay offered for this position may vary based on several individual factors, including job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package may also include additional components/benefits depending on the specific role. This information will be shared if an employment offer is extended.