Careers at LightCam

We’re a small team building something we believe in — a camera for the porch, for the family, for the life you’ve worked hard to protect. When we grow, it’s with people who care about the craft and the mission. Right now, we have one opening.

Open Positions

Senior Firmware Engineer — Founding

1 opening
Location
Remote (Mountain West preferred) or In-Person
Compensation
$140,000–$155,000 + 0.5% equity (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)
Benefits
Competitive health, dental, and vision

The role

LightCam is a smart porch light and security camera in one. Twist it into any light socket — no drill, no wiring, no electrician. The product is built on an Ambarella CV28M SoC running embedded Linux, and you’ll be the person who makes it work flawlessly in the field — on 9,400 devices already in inventory and every device we ship after that.

This is not a hand-off role. You’ll own the firmware stack end-to-end: from bootloader to cloud protocol, from OTA pipeline to camera tuning. You’ll be the first firmware engineer on the US team and a founding employee of the company.

The work is real and the stakes are real. When something breaks on a device in someone’s porch light at 2am, you’re the person who figures out why.

What you’ll own

  • Full embedded Linux firmware stack on Ambarella CV28M (YOCTO build system)
  • OTA update pipeline (SWUpdate) — reliability and safety at fleet scale
  • Device connectivity — MQTT / AWS IoT Core, BLE provisioning, Kinesis video streaming
  • Camera pipeline — V4L2, 3A tuning, person detection inference at the edge
  • Peripheral integration — I2C, SPI, UART, LED driver
  • Field diagnostics — debugging deployed devices without physical access
  • CI/CD for firmware builds and release gating

What we’re looking for

Required
  • 8+ years C/C++ embedded development
  • Embedded Linux — kernel, device drivers, systemd, cross-compilation
  • Yocto or Buildroot
  • OTA update systems (SWUpdate, RAUC, or equivalent)
  • MQTT and IoT protocol stacks
  • BLE provisioning
  • Hardware bring-up and low-level debugging (JTAG, logic analyzer)
  • Git and CI/CD in an embedded context
Nice to have
  • Ambarella SoC experience (CV28, CV2x, or S5L family)
  • AWS IoT Core / Greengrass
  • GStreamer or Kinesis Video Streams
  • 3A tuning (auto-exposure, auto-focus, auto-white-balance)
  • ML/CV experience — YOLO, RetinaFace, or similar edge inference pipelines
  • Python for tooling and automation
  • Camera pipeline experience (V4L2, ISP configuration)

Why LightCam

You’ll be employee #1 on the US firmware team. The product is real, the inventory exists, and the market is wide open. You’ll have equity, ownership, and the chance to build something people actually put on their porch and love.

We donate $5 from every device sold to Warrior Rising (veteran entrepreneurs) and the Sagebrush Network (Mountain West public lands).

Don’t see a fit?

We’d still love to hear from you. Email careers@lightcam.com and tell us what you do.