Engineering Manager, Firmware

🚀 CUJO AI® is a leader in artificial intelligence solutions for network service providers. We use machine learning and real-world data to develop cybersecurity, device intelligence, network intelligence, and parental control solutions that make internet connections safer for millions of homes.

About the Role 

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Firmware (Protection Services) team — the engineers who build and operate the on-device network security and parental control software that runs inside operator home routers (CPE devices) in millions of households.

This is a people leadership role with real technical depth. You will own the team’s roadmap and delivery, coach and grow the engineers in it, and stay close enough to the technology to make good calls alongside your senior engineers and architects. You are not expected to be full-time hands-on, but you are expected to hold your own in a design review and to earn the trust of engineers who have spent their careers in native code.

The stack is: native code on embedded Linux, written in C and increasingly Rust, with Lua plugins and POSIX shell alongside. Features sit deep in the Linux network stack, and ship across a wide matrix of vendor router platforms built with OpenWrt, Yocto and Buildroot. Validation runs on in-house test automation (Pytest, shell) and CI/CD pipelines, against physical test lab infrastructure.

The agent runs in a demanding landscape: tight memory and CPU budgets, a large and shifting platform matrix, and software that has to keep running unattended in the field for years. It ships into operator environments with strict quality and release expectations, and CUJO AI operates in a regulated and governed environment with ISO 9001 and SOC 2 Type 2 certified operating practices.

In This Role, You Will: 

• Lead, coach and grow a team of firmware and embedded engineers (and, where applicable, team leads) — regular 1:1s, career development, and honest performance feedback.
• Own delivery of your team’s roadmap — planning, prioritising and unblocking work, and balancing technical debt against new feature development.
• Guide the team’s work on network security, parental control and device intelligence features for Linux-based CPE devices, and the porting effort as new vendor platforms come on stream.
• Participate in technical design and architecture reviews — enough depth to guide decisions on native code design, network-stack integration, memory and performance budgets, and platform portability.
• Steward the team’s C-to-Rust direction in embedded contexts, balancing the pull of a safer language against a large existing native codebase and constrained targets.
• Own test and validation strategy — functional, performance and resilience testing, the automated test infrastructure behind it, and the test lab planning and investment the team depends on.
• Champion engineering best practices — test automation, CI/CD, code review, documentation, incident response — and continuously improve how the team works.
• Partner with product management, architecture and other engineering managers to align technical direction with business goals.
• Manage cross-team dependencies — cloud and backend, QA, delivery, and operator-facing teams — and communicate trade-offs clearly to stakeholders.
• Drive hiring, onboarding and team structure decisions in partnership with recruiting.
• Report on team health, delivery risk and technical direction to senior leadership.
• Work within our regulated and governed operating model (ISO 9001, SOC 2 Type 2) without losing delivery speed.

What We’re Looking For: 

• 5+ years of professional software, firmware or networking engineering experience, including 2+ years in a formal or informal leadership role.
• A track record of managing and developing engineers or engineering leads — not just coordinating work, but growing people.
• A hands-on engineering background in native code development on Linux — enough to evaluate architecture, review designs in C and/or Rust, and be credible with senior engineers.
• Working knowledge of the Linux network stack and Linux OS architecture — you can follow a discussion about IP-based protocols and contribute to it.
• Familiarity with embedded Linux build systems — OpenWrt, Yocto or Buildroot — and an understanding of what makes cross-platform porting expensive.
• Experience owning delivery for a product area end to end: roadmap planning through shipping and post-launch support.
• Appreciation for CI/CD, TDD and test automation as delivery infrastructure, not overhead — and willingness to fund and defend it.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity and making decisions on incomplete information.
• Experience with agile / iterative delivery practices (Scrum, Kanban or similar).
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to translate low-level technical detail for non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working in a global organisation with international teams — most of your colleagues will be in other countries (primarily EU area and North America).
• Fluency in English (spoken and written).

What Will Make You Stand Out: 

• Direct experience shipping embedded systems, firmware, or networking / Wi-Fi products to volume.
• Hands-on background with Rust in a production embedded context, or having led a team through a C-to-Rust transition.
• Experience building firewalls, protocol clients, or deep-packet / traffic-inspection software.
• Familiarity with Wi-Fi chipsets and drivers (Broadcom, MediaTek, Qualcomm) and OpenWrt-based gateway solutions.
• Experience with CPE, router or gateway platforms and the vendor SDK realities that come with them.
• Experience leading teams that ship into operator or carrier environments, with the release discipline that implies.
• Experience designing automated test infrastructure for embedded or network products, including physical lab environments.
• Jenkins or comparable CI/CD at scale across a multi-platform build matrix.
• Experience running remote or distributed teams.
• Experience in regulated or certified environments (ISO 9001, SOC 2 Type 2 or similar).
• Prior experience navigating formal product maturity frameworks (stage-gate or concept-gate processes).
• Experience growing engineers into senior and staff-level roles.
• Familiarity with Jira, Confluence and Slack for team operations.

Why Join CUJO AI? 

• Flexible Work – Hybrid or fully remote options based on your location.
• Modern Equipment – Top-of-the-line development tools to do your best work.
• Team Gatherings – Annual company events and team activities. 
• Career Growth – Conferences, training, books, and anything else you need to keep developing.
• Performance Bonuses – Company-wide annual bonus program. 
• Meaningful Work – Help make the internet safer for millions of people around the world.

The compensation package ranges from 6,000 to 8,000 EUR (gross), depending on your experience. We are focused on finding the right person for this role and are open to discussing salary expectations based on your skills, competencies, and experience. 

At CUJO AI, we value innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Join us and work on technology that makes the internet safer!

📅 Apply by September 6, 2026 – but don’t wait! We’ll hire as soon as we find the right person. 

📩 Apply via our recruitment portal. Questions? Email us at [email protected].