Senior Embedded Systems Engineer

Taiv is a fast-growing tech startup located in Winnipeg, Canada. Taiv uses AI to make business TV more fun, engaging, profitable, and easier to manage, starting with bars and restaurants. We’ve built proprietary tech that uses computer vision to watch live TV and improve the content with contextually-aware commercials, content, and games. Our tech also automates the manual AV tasks that venues have to do every day, to make bar management easier, standardized, and more profitable. We’re venture-capital backed and graduated from Y Combinator, the world’s top tech accelerator, in winter 2020. Program alumni include Airbnb, Instacart, DoorDash, etc. (www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies).

We are looking for a Senior Embedded Systems Engineer to join our growing team!

Everything Taiv does runs through the Taiv box, the Android device we install behind TVs in bars and restaurants across North America. This role owns the software on it. Our boxes sit in AV racks in real venues and run every day in messy environments, where the equipment around them rarely behaves the way the spec says it will.

You’ll work deep in the embedded stack, across the Android platform and the video and audio paths our AI depends on. You’ll bring up new hardware revisions, cut latency out of the video path, chase down HDMI compatibility bugs that show up on exactly one brand of TV, and decide how our embedded platform evolves as the fleet grows. The work you do shows up in the performance and reliability of every box we deploy.

This is a role for someone who has built and shipped a physical product before and likes the problems that live where software meets hardware. Ideally you’ve worked on TVs, AV gear, or other multimedia products. As the most senior embedded engineer on the team, you’ll set technical direction, make the architecture calls, and mentor the engineers around you while staying hands-on in the code. If you’ve spent your career going deeper into the stack while everyone else moved up it, this role was built for you.

• Own the Android platform on Taiv’s hardware: AOSP builds, framework changes, HALs, and the system services that keep tens of thousands of deployed devices healthy.
• Develop and debug Linux kernel drivers and device trees, and lead board bring-up for new hardware revisions on ARM SoCs.
• Build and tune the multimedia pipeline: video input, hardware codecs, and real-time video processing. Own the audio and video paths that feed our on-device AI.
• Make Taiv work in the real world of venue AV: HDMI edge cases, EDID quirks, CEC and TV control, and compatibility across thousands of different cable boxes and TVs.
• Debug across every layer, from app to framework to HAL to kernel to hardware, using remote tooling on deployed devices and lab equipment on your desk.

• You’ve gone deep on Android. You’re comfortable in AOSP source and know what happens between an app call and the driver underneath it. You’ve shipped platform-level changes to real devices.
• You’re at home in the kernel. Device trees, driver debugging, board bring-up, and the occasional kernel panic are all normal work for you.
• You know multimedia end to end: how video gets captured, encoded, decoded, and displayed, and where latency hides in that path.
• You debug with hardware on your desk. When the logs run out, you reach for a serial console or a logic analyzer.
• You think in fleets. Watchdogs, staged rollouts, remote updates, and recovery paths come naturally because you’ve supported devices you can’t physically touch.
• You work independently and own a problem from vague symptom all the way to shipped fix.

• 5+ years of embedded software experience, with significant time on Android platform work (AOSP, framework, HAL development)
• Strong C and C++, comfortable in Java or Kotlin for framework work and Python or shell for tooling
• Linux kernel experience: writing and debugging drivers, device trees, and board bring-up on ARM SoCs
• Multimedia experience: hardware video codecs and the Android audio HAL
• Experience with HDMI and AV systems: video processing, CEC, EDID, and display pipelines
• Fluent with adb, fastboot, git, and cross-compilation toolchains
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent experience

• Experience with ARM SoCs used in set-top, TV, or streaming products
• Experience running ML models on embedded devices (NPU or GPU acceleration)
• Bootloader and Android system update experience (A/B updates, recovery)
• You’ve shipped a consumer electronics product and supported it in the field at scale

• Employee stock options
• 100% employer-covered health benefits
• Flex-time & unlimited paid vacation
• Gym membership
• Catered lunches 3x per week
• Dog-friendly office
• Hybrid work model
• Free parking on-site

• Job Type: Full-time
• Salary: $100,000 - $150,000
• Schedule: Monday to Friday
• Ability to commute: can reliably commute to the office (required)