Audio Firmware Engineer
Hark
$120,000 - $300,000 / year
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Description
About Hark
Hark is an artificial intelligence company building advanced, personalized intelligence. One that is proactive, multimodal, and capable of interacting with the world through speech, text, vision, and persistent memory.
We're pairing that intelligence with next-generation hardware to create a universal interface between humans and machines. While today's AI largely operates through chat boxes and decade-old devices, Hark is focused on what comes next: agentic systems that interact naturally with people and the real world.
To get there, we're developing multimodal models and next-generation AI hardware together - designed from the ground up as a single, unified interface for a new era of intelligent systems.
About the Role
We’re looking for an experienced Audio Firmware Engineer to develop and optimize embedded audio solutions on Hark’s next-gen AI device. This role spans audio system bring-up, DSP algorithms development, integration and optimization, and deployment of advanced audio/AI features for consumer devices. The ideal candidate should be comfortable developing, integrating, debugging, tuning, and validating audio algorithms on an embedded production platform.
Responsibilities
- Bring up audio processing stack on new hardware, drive implementation and integrations of audio processing pipeline
- Debug complex audio issues end-to-end using platform logs, working from kernel and DSP traces up through application-level symptoms
- Partner with the AI team to support audio-driven inference workloads (wake word, ASR, speech enhancement) within latency, power, and memory budgets
- Collaborate with hardware, acoustics, and product teams from prototype through production to ship audio that feels effortless to users
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional firmware or embedded audio development, ideally on consumer products that have shipped at scale
- Experience with core Audio DSP algorithms and their implementations, including AEC, Beamforming, NR, AGC, VAD, DoA estimation etc.
- Experience with post processing pipelines including Audio mixing/routing, Ducking, Channel Mapping, EQ, filtering and sample rate conversion etc.
- Proficient with C/C++ in resource-constrained, real-time environments
- Strong hands-on development experience with speech and microphone-array signal processing algorithms
Bonus Qualifications
- Experience with AudioReach framework and Hexagon DSP ISA
- DSP optimization experience, including fixed-point development, SIMD and VLIW.
- Experience working alongside hardware engineers during board bring-up and reading schematics for audio subsystems
- Experience deploying machine learning models on embedded platforms, especially audio models running on DSP or NPU
- Background shipping voice-first or far-field audio products
Compensation
The US base salary range for this full-time position is between $120,000 - $300,000 annually.
The pay offered for this position may vary based on several individual factors, including job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The total compensation package may also include additional components/benefits depending on the specific role. This information will be shared if an employment offer is extended.
About this role
Hark is building AI hardware and multimodal intelligence systems, and this role sits at the intersection of that vision—you'd own the audio firmware layer that enables their next-generation device to interact naturally with users through speech and sound. The work spans the full stack: bringing up audio processing on new hardware, developing and integrating DSP algorithms, debugging real-world audio issues from kernel traces to application symptoms, and partnering with AI teams to ensure wake-word detection, speech recognition, and audio enhancement all run within strict latency, power, and memory constraints.
You'll need at least five years of embedded audio or firmware development, with hands-on experience shipping consumer products at scale. The role demands deep knowledge of audio DSP fundamentals—acoustic echo cancellation, beamforming, noise reduction, voice activity detection, direction of arrival—and the post-processing pipelines that follow: mixing, routing, EQ, filtering, and sample rate conversion. Strong C/C++ skills in real-time, resource-constrained environments and a solid foundation in microphone-array and speech signal processing are essential.
If you've optimized DSP code with fixed-point arithmetic or SIMD, worked with Hexagon DSP or AudioReach, debugged hardware during board bring-up, or shipped voice-first products, you'd be a particularly strong fit. The role is full-time, in-office in San Jose, with a base salary range of $120,000 to $300,000 depending on experience and qualifications.
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Pay for this role
$120,000 to $300,000 per year
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