Software Engineering Manager, Firmware Products

The Product Experience (P.Ex) organization is responsible for how the motorcycle feels to use. We design and build the firmware that runs on the bike, the dash the rider sees, the mobile app they carry, the diagnostic tools used in the field, and the cloud systems that connect them.

The Firmware Products team, within the P.Ex org, is responsible for delivering the behavior of the motorcycle itself. The team spans firmware development, battery performance engineering, and test engineering, owning the full value chain from firmware requirements to field validation. Every safety decision, performance characteristic, and response the bike makes to the rider runs through this system. Riders love and trust it.

We are expanding to multiple ambitious platforms. As we do, we are looking for a leader who can learn alongside the team and mentor the team to deliver in smaller batches, with faster validation and instrumentation, and set up feedback loops that bring rider behavior directly into how work gets prioritized. We need someone who can set up systems that help the team learn continuously without disrupting the care they have for each other.

What You'll Do

You will lead the Firmware Products team end to end, leading 8-12 engineers across firmware development, battery performance, and test, spread across locations. You decide what problems need to be solved next, and you work with the Firmware, BMS, and Vehicle Architects to ensure they are framed and addressed well. You will care deeply about the people on the team and invest in their growth as engineers, system thinkers, and craftspeople.

You walk in every Monday with more ideas to make your team shoot for greatness than you have the time to implement.

Team Leadership and Growth
• Know what each person cares about, what they are working toward, and what is getting in their way, and act on that knowledge continuously, not just at review time.
• Feedback is direct, specific, and timely. People on this team never wonder where they stand with you.
• Coach lean ways of working across a multi-discipline team by example, and build the conditions where the team becomes self-organizing without authority-driven mandates.

Firmware as a Product
• Think about what riders need from firmware before thinking about what the team should build. That order is not negotiable.
• Translate rider and business needs into work the team can execute in small, testable slices, and keep the backlog honest by saying no to what does not move the product forward.
• Know the difference between a team closing tickets and a team solving problems, and do not let one masquerade as the other.

Stay Technically Hands-On
• Get in the trenches with the Firmware and BMS Architects to create the conditions in which they do their best work: clear priorities, protected focus, and problems framed well enough to be worth solving.
• Partner with the Vehicle Architect to ensure firmware decisions stay coherent at the vehicle level.
• Write code, review code, debug hard problems, and critique designs. Be technically credible enough that architects want to think through their hardest problems with you.

Delivery System and Flow
• Own the system through which work moves from idea to field, and treat improving it as part of the job.
• Keep batches small, integration continuous, and validation part of building rather than after it.
• Surface risk early enough that the team can act on it.

Instrumentation and Field Learning
• Identify, implement, and monitor the firmware data points to understand what is happening on vehicles in the field.
• Build feedback loops between field behavior and how work gets planned, so that rider experience actively shapes the backlog.
• The team learns from usage, instead of reacting to incidents.

Cross-functional Collaboration
• Review hardware design decisions, component qualification, and vendor firmware where they affect system behavior.
• Work with CX to ensure firmware releases reach customers without friction, and that what CX hears from customers finds its way back into how work gets prioritized.
• Keep program commitments grounded in technical reality. Partner with PMO and surface risks early enough that they can be managed.
• Represent the team's work to the exec team and marketing in terms that shape decisions, not just inform them.

AI Adoption
• Use AI tools fluently and daily, with tools like Claude Code as a starting point, and push well into using AI as a genuine thought partner in architecture, debugging, prioritization, and technical decision-making.
• Drive AI adoption across the team with urgency, finding concrete ways it unlocks higher levels of performance, and bring leadership along with you.
• Create upward pressure. If there are tools or capabilities the team needs and does not yet have, you surface them and make the case.

What You Bring

You bring 10-15 years of embedded development experience and at least 3-5 years leading a multi-discipline team. You will be stretched, but you will not be doing it alone. You do not need to check every box on this list. If you bring the hunger to close gaps and the self-awareness to know where they are, the team and the manager will meet you there.

People Leadership
• You have grown engineers who were not ready for the next level and got them there. You have given feedback that was hard to hear, in a way that strengthened the relationship.
• You have managed across locations and found ways to make distance irrelevant to the quality of someone's experience on the team.

Product Thinking
• You have made prioritization calls that were unpopular in the short term and right in the long term. You can explain why without defensiveness.
• You have worked in environments where the temptation to build more was constant, and you developed the discipline to build less, better.
• You can gather enough context about users, business constraints, and technical tradeoffs to form a view and act on it.

Embedded Systems and Firmware Depth
• You have spent years shipping multithreaded, real-time embedded firmware in C. You can smell problems before they surface.
• You understand how firmware and hardware constrain each other in powertrain and EV systems, and you have made decisions at that boundary under genuine program pressure, including in the field.
• You are proficient debugging embedded systems at the bench. You read schematics and datasheets, and you are comfortable with UARTs, JTAG, and oscilloscopes.

Delivery and Flow
• You have pushed a team toward smaller batches in an environment that was not set up for it, and you have at least one story where it made a measurable difference.
• You have experience shipping in safety-critical or regulated environments and you found ways to move faster without compromising integrity.
• You have set up or incrementally improved CI/CD in an embedded context, adapting and customizing tooling to fit the constraints of the hardware and the team.

Collaboration and Influence
• You have worked alongside deeply technical experts and found ways to move work forward without needing to win every argument or own every decision.
• You have represented technical work to non-technical stakeholders in terms that changed how they thought about a decision, not just informed them.
• You have navigated competing priorities across teams without creating turf wars or waiting for someone above you to resolve the tension.

AI Fluency
• You use AI tools daily as a working practitioner, not as a curiosity. You have already moved well past autocompletion into using AI to think through hard problems.
• You have introduced AI tools to a team in a way that changed how they work, not just what they use.
• You know where AI judgment cannot be trusted in safety-critical systems and you apply that judgment consistently.

What You Can Expect
• Real cross-functional work with Firmware, BMS, Vehicle Architecture, PMO, CX, and Hardware in problem spaces that require you to understand the whole system.
• A team and management that will tell you the truth about your work, fight for your growth, and have your back when things get hard.
• Problems that are not fully defined, where your judgment about what matters next is what the role actually requires.
• A system that is in use, under pressure, and not finished, which means the work you do here has consequences that show up in the field.

Location: Scotts Valley, CA

Physical Requirements

Ability to communicate in real-time with internal and external partners.

Ability to safely and effectively navigate a lab environment.

Ability to occasionally lift 30 pounds.

Ability to work for extended periods in face-to-face meetings, on computers, or in a lab environment.

The estimated salary range for a new hire in this position is $180,000 to $200,000. Actual salary may vary depending on job-related factors, which may include candidate's knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to regular salary, Zero offers a comprehensive benefits package including health, life, and disability insurance, paid time off, and a 401(k)-matching plan.

Zero Motorcycles, Inc.

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Software Engineering Manager, Firmware Products