Hiring: Device & Embedded Systems Architect 🚨
📍 Remote
Position Summary:
ClearCaptions and Clear Wellness operate an expanding portfolio of purpose-built hardware—captioned landline and portable/mobile phones, and a growing suite of IoT health and wellness devices serving hundreds of thousands of customers. Today, critical areas of device ownership—proprietary endpoint software, Android version lifecycle, device management, telemetry pipelines, and over-the-air (OTA) update infrastructure—sit outside the scope of the enterprise architecture team.
The Device & Embedded Systems Architect is a technical individual contributor role created to close this gap. This architect will own the end-to-end technical architecture of our device platform, establishing the patterns, standards, and guardrails that enable both brands to ship reliable, secure, and maintainable hardware products at scale.
This is a Remote/Work from Home position reporting to the Director of Enterprise Architecture.
What you will do:
Proprietary Endpoint Software
Architecture of on-device software stack, OS customization layers, application frameworks, and boot sequences for ClearCaptions phone hardware and ClearWellness IoT devices.
Android Version Lifecycle
Strategy and roadmap for Android version support, security patch cadence, BSP (Board Support Package) management, and end-of-life planning across device generations.
Device Management (MDM/EMM)
Design and governance of device management infrastructure—enrollment, provisioning, policy enforcement, remote configuration, and fleet health monitoring at 100k+ device scale.
Device Telemetry
Architecture of telemetry pipelines from device edge to cloud: event schemas, transport protocols, data fidelity vs. bandwidth tradeoffs, privacy controls, and analytics enablement.
Over-the-Air (OTA) Updates
End-to-end OTA update system design including staged rollouts, A/B partitioning, delta updates, rollback safety, and update success KPI frameworks.
Portable / Mobile Platform (New)
Foundational software architecture for the new ClearCaptions portable / mobile phone—including UI/UX, connectivity, platform security, form-factor constraints, and feature parity with the landline experience.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Architecture & Design
Define and own the reference architecture for all device endpoints across ClearCaptions and ClearWellness, ensuring consistency, security, and scalability across brands.
Lead architectural design of the Android-based device platform including HAL customizations, system services, inter-process communication patterns, and security hardening.
Establish firmware and embedded software architecture standards: bootloader configuration, recovery partitions, secure enclave usage, and hardware abstraction layers.
Design the OTA update framework from scratch or evaluate and adapt open-source solutions (e.g., libchromeos-update-engine, RAUC) to meet ClearCaptions' reliability and scale requirements.
Architect device telemetry systems that balance data richness with network constraints, defining schemas and ingestion patterns that plug into enterprise data pipelines.
Android Lifecycle & Platform Health
Develop a multi-year Android version roadmap aligned to AOSP support windows, hardware EOL dates, and regulatory requirements.
Partner with ODM/OEM vendors and chipset manufacturers to manage BSP updates, security patches, and kernel upgrades.
Define supportability thresholds and sunset criteria for deployed device generations, with migration path recommendations.
Device Management at Scale
Architect or evolve the MDM/EMM platform to support 100,000+ devices across diverse hardware generations, connectivity types, and use-case profiles.
Define device provisioning and de-provisioning workflows that support both technician-assisted and zero-touch deployment models.
Establish fleet segmentation, ring-based rollout policies, and canary frameworks for safely deploying firmware and application updates.
ClearWellness IoT Platform
Provide architectural oversight for current and future ClearWellness IoT health devices—aligning on connectivity standards (BLE, Zigbee, Matter, Wi-Fi), data security models, and interoperability frameworks.
Define an IoT device evaluation framework to accelerate onboarding of new device types, including integration patterns for health data standards (HL7, FHIR) where applicable.
Advise on edge compute vs. cloud compute tradeoffs for health analytics and alerting pipelines.
Standards, Governance & Collaboration
Produce Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), reference architectures, and technical standards documents that guide engineering teams across both brands.
Serve as the primary technical interface with hardware ODM/OEM partners, chipset vendors, and third-party MDM providers.
Collaborate with enterprise architecture, cloud infrastructure, security, and product engineering teams to ensure device-side architecture integrates seamlessly with backend systems.
Mentor senior engineers; raise the embedded and device engineering craft across the organization without direct people management responsibility.
Qualifications:
Required
8+ years of software engineering experience with at least 5 years focused on embedded systems, device software, or mobile platform engineering.
Deep, hands-on expertise in Android platform development—AOSP customization, system app development, HAL implementation, and platform security (dm-verity, SELinux policies, Verified Boot).
Proven experience designing and operating OTA update infrastructure for production consumer device fleets.
Strong knowledge of device management concepts and hands-on experience with MDM/EMM platforms at scale (e.g., Android Enterprise, VMware Workspace ONE, Canonical Landscape, or similar).
Experience architecting embedded telemetry systems—protocol selection (MQTT, CoAP, HTTPS), edge buffering, and integration with cloud ingestion pipelines.
Proficiency with embedded Linux, kernel modules, device trees, and low-level hardware bring-up concepts.
Demonstrated ability to produce clear, actionable architecture documentation and influence engineering decisions across teams.
