Firmware Architect

We are re-engineering the heat pump from the printed circuit board up. We have a product family in the field (Flint, Sparrow, Blackbird), the Swift is on its way, and behind it sits a firmware platform that needs to scale across multiple generations. At -20°C and at 40°C. In tens of thousands of homes. Year after year. For that we don't need someone who writes feature after feature. We need someone who defines and guards the firmware architecture underneath it, in conversation with heat loop & control, power electronics, mechanics, cloud & data, backend & frontend, commerce and installer support. That's why we're hiring a Firmware Architect. 

Where you will land 

In Duizel, everything sits under one roof: firmware, power electronics, refrigerant-cycle engineering, mechanical design, our own PCBA production line, climate chambers, EMC labs, and the cloud & data team. For a hardware company of around 150 people, that is exceptionally vertical, and it's exactly the playground where an architect makes the difference. 

Concretely: a protocol choice you lock down this quarter will sit in tens of thousands of units in the field two years from now. Your hardware is next to your desk, your controls colleagues are two corridors away, your cloud team is on the other end of the Zoom in Utrecht. No tickets fired off to a lab in another country. Today you debug a race condition in the compressor control together with the author of that module. Tomorrow you review a security design with the cloud colleagues. In the afternoon you walk to the PCBA line to settle a driver question. You end the week by putting a new version on test in the climate chamber, where your code runs overnight at -20°C. 

We are winner of the Nationale Ondernemersprijs (Dutch National Entrepreneurs Award) and certified by Kiwa, TÜV SÜD and ISO 9001. Our code already runs in tens of thousands of Dutch homes, and we are just getting started: Netherlands first, Germany now, then broader Europe. The really interesting architectural problems are still on the drawing board: protocol stacks (Thread, Wi-SUN) that work reliably in mesh networks, crypto integration that meets the strictest IoT security requirements, motor-control loops that respond with millisecond precision, and an OTA strategy that keeps hundreds of thousands of units upgradable for years. 

What you will do 

This is a hands-on architecture role: you define, you write code, you debug complex problems, and you keep the foundation stable while others build on top of it. No handover forms. No consultants translating your sketch. You set up the system inside which the whole firmware team works, and you build along with them. 

• Define the firmware architecture of the platform: module boundaries, interfaces between control loops and services, OTA strategy, secure boot and key management, observability and diagnostic interfaces. Consistent across the entire product family and consciously designed for multiple generations. 

• Treat norms, regulations and security baselines as a design force, not a final check. Translate IEC 60730-1 (functional safety for household appliances), EN 60335-2-40, Radio Equipment Directive, ETSI EN 303 645 / Cyber Resilience Act and GDPR for telemetry into concrete architectural rules and interfaces that the whole team uses. 

• Design the execution of the control strategy together with heat loop & control engineers: real-time control loops, EXV control, charge management, fault detection and safe-state behaviour. What the control strategy must be able to do partly defines how the firmware layer below it is built.