Verkada - Engineering Manager – Camera Firmware Platform
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++; experience with Go or other higher-level languages preferred. • 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) and reasoning about their trade-offs. • 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. • 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.
Responsibilities
• Lead the team • Lead and grow a team of storage, firmware, and systems engineers, and recruit and retain top-tier embedded talent as the team expands its charter. • 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, balancing fleet-wide investments against support for new camera launches. • Establish engineering best practices around testing, observability, incident response, root-cause analysis, and long-term maintainability. • Drive storage optimizations • Storage stack and architecture: Own the on-camera storage stack end to end, including filesystems (ext4, UBIFS), video layout and indexing, SD/eMMC drivers, and raw NAND. Lead next-generation storage architecture such as new SD card modes, partition-level encryption, and secure deletion of expired footage. • Storage stack and architecture: • Reliability, endurance, and retention: Guarantee footage integrity through power loss, filesystem corruption, and failing media. Minimize write amplification with aligned, batched writes, and extend retention through index compression, smarter SD card capacity allocation, and better high versus low-quality stream storage. • Reliability, endurance, and retention: • Storage observability: Build deep storage observability of SD and NAND health, erase counts, bad blocks, UBI counters, writes per hour, and retention metrics that feed release go/no-go decisions. • Storage observability: • Testing: Build hardware-in-the-loop testing for storage disaster cases such as full-period retention, OTA transitions across storage layout changes, partition reformats, EEPROM recovery, and SD controller firmware updates. • Testing: • Media qualification: Partner with Hardware teams and external flash vendors to evaluate, qualify, and validate next-generation storage media. • Media qualification: • Backend and network storage: Guide the evolution of storage-adjacent backend systems for retention, cloud backup, archives, and storage health notifications. Build on-premises storage appliances where cameras back up footage to RAID-backed hard drives over the LAN, with SMART-based drive health monitoring. • Backend and network storage: • Drive firmware platform improvements • Boot and shutdown: Optimize boot and shutdown paths across the boot stack, kernel, userspace services, and backend connection. This is critical for reducing downtime and maximizing video footage retention. • Boot and shutdown: • System resources: Optimize memory, power, and network on resource-constrained embedded devices. Reduce DRAM and flash footprint of firmware services. Prevent brownouts at peak load with power management schemes such as Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS). Make network traffic between device and backend more efficient and resilient with techniques such as retry backoff with jitter and connection consolidation. • System resources: • Device State Management: Orchestrate device-level state transitions such as system and service restarts, OTA, DSP pipeline restart, commissioning and decommissioning. Sequencing these operations in the correct order is critical for correct device function. • Device State Management: • Observability and debuggability: Add core dumps and stack traces for crashes, reliable IPC message delivery, power-on self tests, standardized per-service and fleet-wide metrics, and system-wide log levels. • Observability and debuggability: • Developer and release velocity: Improve build and kernel tooling, remote serial and flashing access, AI-assisted code review and workflows, and standardized manufacturing release and flashing automation across camera models. • Operate at fleet scale • Own fleet-wide reliability metrics for retention, storage health, crash rates, memory pressure, boot time, and power, and make them visible in release go/no-go decisions. • Find and fix issues before customers notice them, using diagnostic data from across the fleet.
Benefits
• Verkada is committed to fostering a workplace environment that prioritizes the holistic health and wellbeing of our employees and their families by offering comprehensive wellness perks, benefits, and resources. Our benefits and perks programs include, but are not limited to: • Healthcare programs that can be tailored to meet the personal health and financial well-being needs - Premiums are 100% covered for the employee under at least one plan and 80% for family premiums under all plans • Nationwide medical, vision and dental coverage • Starting January 2027, Verkada will match a portion of an employee’s 401(k) contributions based on eligible earnings. Match vests on 2 year anniversary • Health Saving Account (HSA) with annual employer contributions and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) with tax saving options • Expanded mental health support • Paid parental leave policy & fertility benefits • Time off to relax and recharge through our paid holidays, firmwide extended holidays, flexible PTO and personal sick time • Professional development stipend • Wellness/fitness benefits • Healthy lunches provided daily • Commuter benefits • At Verkada, we want to attract and retain the best employees, and compensate them in a way that appropriately and fairly values their individual contribution to the company. With that in mind, we carefully consider a number of factors to determine the appropriate starting pay for an employee, including their primary work location and an assessment of a candidate's skills and experience, as well as market demands and internal parity. A Verkada employee may be eligible for additional forms of compensation, depending on their role, including sales incentives, discretionary bonuses, and/or equity in the company in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs) • Below is the annual on-target earnings (OTE) range for full-time employees for this position, comprised of base compensation and commissions (if applicable). • $200,000 - $315,000 USD
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