Firmware Engineer

About ALSO.

We’re ALSO, an electric mobility company originally conceived as a part of Rivian. We’re a passionate team of builders, dreamers, doers and innovators, focused on creating entirely new (not to mention, innovative and delightful) vertically integrated, small EVs designed to meet the global mobility challenges of today and tomorrow. Our mission is to inspire everyone to ride ALSO—replacing many local car, truck and SUV miles with ones on vehicles that are more affordable, more enjoyable and 10-50x more efficient.

At ALSO, we are looking for a Staff Firmware Security Architect to set the technical direction for our vehicle firmware security platform — secure boot, cryptographic key lifecycle, network integrity, and trusted OTA.

You'd own the end-to-end security architecture that protects every ECU across our product portfolio, make the hard cross-cutting calls that product teams build on, and partner with cloud, manufacturing, and firmware teams to make security practical in CI, on the bench, and in production. You'd raise the bar for the entire organization through design leadership, mentorship, and hands-on delivery of the most critical trust paths in the vehicle.

What You'll Do

• Secure boot & root of trust: define secure boot architecture across MCU families (ROM → bootloader → app) — image signing, verification, anti-rollback, and debug/JTAG lockdown for production — setting the standard other ECU teams adopt

• Key storage & management: own the on-device and fleet key strategy (HSM/OTP/secure element), key hierarchy design, and integration with signing and PKI services across development, manufacturing, and field

• Network & bus integrity: lead CAN/CAN-FD security design (authentication, integrity, encryption where required), and establish policies for protected diagnostics and secure UDS access platform-wide

• OTA security: own end-to-end trust for firmware updates — signed/encrypted payloads, on-device verification, rollback safety, and secure handoff between cloud signing infrastructure and vehicle update flows

• Platform security frameworks: architect reusable security libraries and APIs (crypto wrappers, secure storage, auth services) that product ECU teams adopt without reinventing trust

• Threat modeling & hardening: lead threat models across boot, update, and network attack surfaces, and partner with product and cloud teams on security reviews and production readiness

• Validation & cross-functional leadership: drive security test strategy (benchtop PoCs, negative tests, HIL scenarios), integrate critical checks into CI, mentor engineers on secure design, and align firmware, cloud, manufacturing, and systems stakeholders on requirements and trade-offs