Freelance Embedded Firmware Engineer Jobs in Indiana

At Arrive AI (Nasdaq: ARAI), we're not just building products—we're transforming the future of the Autonomous Last Mile™ (ALM). Over a decade ago, we started with a pioneering vision and patents for the first smart mailbox for drone delivery. Through systematic research, development, and deep customer collaboration, we've evolved to today where we deploy Arrive Points—a type of smart locker and mini-cross-docks for frictionless drone, robotic, and courier delivery and pickup, utilized from medical supplies to meals to e-commerce. Arrive AI is now growing and investing to scale an ALM network and platform of the future for all autonomous delivery providers, services, and customers. Arrive AI is the intelligent choice for the last inch of the Autonomous Last Mile™.

About Us:

We move fast, balancing strategy with opportunity. We are merit-based, valuing integrity, innovation, and treating others as we want to be treated. At Arrive AI, every employee is an equity holder and a business owner. Our shared vision, ownership, and culture fuel our mission to revolutionize autonomous delivery.

Product Team

You’ll be joining Arrive AI’s Product Team to revolutionize Autonomous Last Mile (ALM) logistics by transforming over a decade of research, design, and customer collaboration into the world’s first autonomous logistics network and platform. Our fast-paced skunkworks team rapidly iterates, prototypes, and develops next-generation Arrive Point units, networks, and AI-powered platforms. By integrating cutting-edge hardware, robotics, IoT, software, data, AI, and manufacturing, we’re driving a bold roadmap for ALM innovation. Based in Fishers, IN, we offer a unique opportunity to do your life’s best work, shape the future, and share in the success.

Role Overview

Arrive AI is hiring a Electrical Engineer – Firmware to own the low-level software that brings our next-generation autonomous delivery hardware to life. This is a new-product role: you will write firmware for boards that are still on the bench, work directly alongside the electrical engineers designing them, and carry designs from first power-on through validated, repeatable operation.

Our embedded stack is written in Rust. Prior Rust experience is welcome but not required — see the note below.

What You'll Do

Firmware Architecture & Development

• Design, implement, and maintain firmware for microcontroller-based subsystems across multiple concurrent hardware programs

• Author and own hardware abstraction layers that let application logic survive board revisions and silicon changes

• Write device drivers for sensors, actuators, motor controllers, power management, and communication peripherals

• Design and tune RTOS task structures, priorities, and IPC for deterministic, real-time behavior

• Make and defend architectural tradeoffs around memory footprint, power budget, latency, and fault tolerance

Hardware Bring-Up & Prototyping

• Take new PCB designs from first power-on through peripheral validation, working from schematics, datasheets, and reference manuals

• Partner with electrical engineers during design reviews to catch firmware-hostile decisions before boards are fabricated

• Build the bench tooling, harnesses, and test fixtures that make prototype iteration fast

• Support hardware evaluations and component bake-offs with the instrumentation and measurements needed to decide on evidence rather than opinion

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Define clean interfaces between firmware and the network, platform, and edge compute layers so teams can move independently

• Work with platform software engineers on data flow between firmware, edge compute, and cloud services

• Shift low-level software work off the electrical engineering team so EE capacity stays on EE problems

• Mentor teammates on embedded practice, and help grow embedded Rust and firmware capability across the group

Testing, Debugging & Reliability

• Develop firmware test plans spanning unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop testing

• Debug on real hardware with JTAG/SWD, logic analyzers, and oscilloscopes — including the intermittent, timing-dependent, and only-on-this-one-board failures

• Improve observability through structured logging, telemetry, and on-device diagnostics

• Design for graceful degradation: watchdogs, fault recovery, safe states, and brownout behavior

Documentation & Best Practices

• Document firmware architecture, hardware interfaces, register maps, and bring-up procedures clearly enough for the next engineer

• Contribute to coding standards, code review culture, version control practice, and firmware release management

• Help establish repeatable build, flash, and provisioning processes as programs move from prototype toward production

What We're Looking For

We are prioritizing depth of real-world firmware experience over any specific language on a résumé. If you have shipped firmware that had to work reliably in the physical world, we want to talk.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience

• 5+ years of professional experience developing firmware for embedded systems

• Deep proficiency in C/C++ for resource-constrained targets — memory models, pointers and aliasing, interrupt handlers, concurrency hazards, and the failure modes that come with them

• Hands-on production experience with an RTOS (Zephyr, FreeRTOS, ThreadX, or similar) and/or bare-metal systems

• Demonstrated experience designing or maintaining hardware abstraction layers, not only consuming vendor-supplied ones

• Fluency with embedded communication protocols: UART, SPI, I²C, CAN, Ethernet

• Proven track record debugging firmware on real hardware with hardware debug tools

• Ability to work independently from datasheets and reference manuals, and to be productive on unproven hardware where the bug could be in your code, the board, or the part

• Demonstrated ability to perform advanced PCB/board design, in addition to writing low-level/base firmware for the boards they design

Preferred Qualifications

• Embedded Rust experience — no_std development, embedded-hal, and async or concurrency frameworks such as Embassy or RTIC

• Zephyr RTOS specifically, including devicetree and its driver model

• Electrical engineering background, or enough comfort with schematics and instrumentation to contribute in hardware design reviews

• Experience bridging Rust and C via FFI, or integrating firmware components written in different languages behind a defined interface

• Familiarity with ARM-based microcontrollers and SoCs, and with Linux-based embedded systems

• Exposure to robotics, IoT, motion control, or autonomous systems

• Understanding of secure boot, OTA firmware updates, and device lifecycle management

• Experience in an early-stage or prototype-heavy environment where requirements and hardware change underneath you

At this time, we are not able to provide visa sponsorship for this position.

A Note on Rust

Our embedded software is written in Rust. Previous Rust development experience is not a hard requirement for this role, however, hands-on experience with and mastery of embedded C programming is. If you are willing to learn and have the background, we will provide the training and support you need.