💼 6 to 8 years

📍Bangalore, India

⏰ On-site

About Aina

Aina is a design-led consumer hardware company building a new generation of interfaces for the age of AI. We believe today's computers are still designed for browsing, even as AI becomes capable of understanding context, intent, and acting on our behalf. We're building a general-purpose interface beyond keyboards and touchscreens, designed to make interacting with AI effortless.

For our first year, we operated in stealth as Project Mirage, a Human-Computer Interaction lab exploring how people interact with AI in everyday life. We showcased three experimental interfaces at CES 2026, shipped Dune—a context-aware keypad for Mac—to hundreds of early adopters, and used everything we learned to validate our thesis on the future of Human-Computer Interaction.

In July 2026, Aina emerged from stealth with a $5.5 million seed round led by Redstart Labs and 360 ONE Asset to bring its flagship interface to market.

Role Overview

We're looking for a senior firmware leader to own the architecture and delivery of low-power, always-connected Bluetooth audio firmware on Qualcomm's QCC5/3 SoC family, from board bring-up through mass production. You'll build and lead a small firmware team, working closely with hardware, mobile, and product to ship a reliable, field-ready wearable.

What You'll Own

• Own firmware architecture for Qualcomm QCC51xx/QCC30xx/QCC5/3 Bluetooth audio chips, designing low-power, always-connected firmware for BR/EDR, BLE, audio profiles, and connection management, plus patterns for OTA/DFU, fault handling, logging, and diagnostics.
• Translate product requirements into a firmware roadmap with clear milestones and releases, and lead board bring-up for new hardware revisions, covering boot, clocks, power, flash, GPIO, and peripherals like SPI, I2C, and UART.
• Hire, mentor, and lead a small, high-performing firmware team, while driving solid documentation (architecture overviews, bring-up guides, debug playbooks, test plans) and setting up CI/CD with automated regression testing.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Hardware/RF on schematics, pin assignments, power tree, and design-for-test; with Mechanical/ID on antenna and sensor constraints; with Mobile teams on BLE services, data models, and OTA upgrade flows; and with Product/UX to balance user experience against power, size, and compute limits.
• Define test strategy across board bring-up, feature testing, regression suites, and long-run reliability testing, including burn-in, stress, battery, and connectivity tests.
• Own factory and production-line test flows, including special test firmware, fixtures, and scripts, and lead root-cause analysis for field issues to ensure fixes propagate quickly and safely.
• Ensure security best practices throughout, including secure boot, signed images, and restricted debug access.

Requirements

1. Direct, hands-on experience with Qualcomm Bluetooth audio SoCs (QCC51xx/QCC30xx/QCC5/3 family) across at least one full product cycle, from prototype through mass production. This is the primary requirement.
2. 5 to 7 years of embedded firmware experience, including 3+ years leading teams or major projects.