Senior Firmware Partner Engineer

Join Axon and be a Force for Good. At Axon, we’re on a mission to Protect Life. We’re explorers, pursuing society’s most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. Like our products, we work better together. We connect with candor and care, seeking out diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other.

Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you’ll take ownership and drive real change. Constantly grow as you work hard for a mission that matters at a company where you matter.

As a mission-driven company, Axon is in the exciting position of having identified an abundance of opportunities to Protect Life, and Accelerate Justice for both our customers and the public more broadly. Therefore, we are leveraging Joint Development Manufacturers (JDMs) and other partners to scale our growth and deliver more products, faster, helping to save lives. In this high-visibility, leadership/technical hybrid role, you will lead the technical direction for our firmware development partners, and contribute to ensuring the partners’ success in scaling Axon’s development efforts.

As a Sr. Partner Engineer I, your leadership will span Axon and our partners. On the Axon side, you will be responsible for ensuring the Axon requirements to partners are technically rigorous, clear, and specific, and account for the needs of all adjacent stakeholders in Firmware (FW) success (e.g. hardware, application software). On the partner side, you will ensure that their FW deliverables integrate well into the broader Axon FW ecosystem, and meet Axon’s high bar for quality and security.

From a technical contribution perspective, you’ll be responsible for getting JDM programs “across the finish line” by providing the occasional technical “glue” to meld Axon and JDM flows and subsystems. As products go to production, you will work with teams to ensure device provisioning and flashing methods are secure, and that sufficient runtime logging and monitoring metrics are in place to diagnose issues in-field.

This role will focus primarily on the development of 1-2 brand new IoT products focused on Axon’s goal to protect life. It is a hybridization of a (a) Firmware Engineer, (b) Technical Project Manager, (c) Product Manager. Some may see this role as a “Field Application Engineer (FAE)” or “Forward Deployed Engineer”, but in reverse - primarily helping our vendors to be successful in their contributions to Axon.

This critical role sits in the Axon Platform Firmware Team and reports to the Partner Engineering Manager. The role will “connect the dots” to ensure that the Axon Platform Firmware mechanisms and expectations are reflected through the JDM vendors.

Firmware development environments primarily include a combination of Embedded Linux and custom Automated Test Systems (ATS).

Location:

Seattle, Boston, Scottsdale, or NYC Tuesday through Friday in the office

Travel:
About 20% to APAC, Scottsdale, Boston, Seattle, and/or Europe

Reports to:

Engineering Manager, Partner Engineering

Direct Reports:
None

• Manage Axon and JDM vendor relations between Firmware Engineering Teams to align short-term, long-term requirements ensuring that the JDM vendor is building the “right thing”
• Treat JDM deliverables as a product in and of themselves, ensuring Axon requirements for that product are clear, thorough, and achievable
• Oversee JDM engagements from planning, vendor selection, execution, and launch
• Ensure that all source code written by JDMs for Board Support Package (BSP) layers is of the highest quality bar before being merged into Axon’s mainline
• Write code as needed to get JDM programs “across the finish line”
• Audit the needs and artifacts of adjacent teams (e.g. hardware, application software) to ensure coherency with FW plans and interfaces
• Be the point of contact for internal stakeholders regarding JDM technical or program status and deliverables
• Be the Axon point of contact for the JDM, not just setting direction, but also for hands‑on support in ensuring they are not blocked in continuously executing and delivering high quality outputs
• Design and/or…