Embedded Engineering Manager

About the role

At WHOOP, we're on a mission to unlock and inspire performance for life. WHOOP empowers members to perform at a higher level through a deeper understanding of their bodies and daily lives.

WHOOP is hiring a Embedded Engineering Manager to build and lead a new embedded team for a next-generation wearable. The team owns the firmware that members interact with directly on the device: how it responds to them, how it presents their data, and how it feels to use every day. It takes that firmware from early prototypes through new product introduction and into production.

This role combines technical leadership with people management. You will lead a team of full-time and contract firmware engineers and grow it as the program scales. You will take part in architecture decisions with the program's technical leads, review the team's code, and own its delivery schedule. You won't be the team's primary developer, but you will be close enough to the code to step in when it helps. You will work closely with Product, Design, Hardware, and Quality, and with the firmware teams building sensors, connectivity, and power on the same device.

RESPONSIBILITIES

- Build, manage, and mentor a team of embedded engineers through hiring, onboarding, feedback, performance management, and career development.

- Direct the work of contract engineers alongside full-time staff, holding both to the same design and code quality bar.

- Lead the team's delivery of the member's on-device experience firmware, from prototype through production release.

- Partner with the program's technical lead and senior engineers on architecture for responsive, power-efficient firmware on resource-constrained multi-core hardware.

- Serve as a player-coach who reviews code and shapes designs, contributing directly when the team needs it.

- Own the team's planning and delivery cadence, keeping scope, dependencies, and risk visible to partners and leadership.

- Partner with Product and Design to turn member experience goals into firmware requirements that fit the hardware's memory, compute, and power budgets.

- Set engineering practices for testing, hardware-in-the-loop validation, release readiness, and field diagnostics.

- Foster a culture of high standards, direct feedback, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous learning.

QUALIFICATIONS

- 5+ years of embedded firmware development in C or C++, including experience as an engineering manager or team lead responsible for mentorship, feedback, and career development.

- Experience shipping firmware in a consumer electronics product, from early hardware bring-up through production.

- Hands-on experience with an RTOS (Zephyr, FreeRTOS, or similar) on microcontrollers or embedded SoCs.

- Experience optimizing firmware for performance, memory, and power on constrained hardware.

- Demonstrated ability to plan and deliver in ambiguous environments, including early-stage hardware programs where requirements are still forming.