Six Figure Work

Senior Power Electronics Firmware Engineer

Tonal

Company websitetonal.com (Tonal, opens in new tab)

Base salary $170K  to $195K

Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in San Francisco, CA

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  • LocationSan Francisco, CA
  • WorkplaceWorkplace not stated
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (1 h ago) · observed since

About this job

Overview

Tonal is looking for a Senior Power Electronics Firmware Engineer to develop the firmware for our motor drive and power systems. That drive generates up to 250 pounds of digital weight, so its firmware defines how Tonal feels to every member. You’ll contribute at every stage, from concept, prototyping, and bring-up through validation and high-volume production.

You’ll join the Firmware team in our Hardware department, working closely with electrical, mechanical, and software engineers. Together, you’ll tackle challenges that span motor control, power conversion, thermal limits, and member safety. Our team offers a rare chance to shape the core technology of a new fitness category.

What You Will Do

  • Develop and improve motor control and power management firmware that makes Tonal’s digital weight feel smooth and responsive

  • Add and maintain protection features, such as overcurrent and overtemperature handling, that keep members safe

  • Bring up and debug new boards in the lab with the electrical team

  • Test and tune motor performance, and help build the tools and automated tests that validate each release

  • Support manufacturing test and calibration, and help investigate issues from the field

  • Work with software, mechanical, and product teams to turn member feedback into firmware improvements

  • Take part in design and code reviews, and help improve how the team builds and ships firmware

Who You Are

  • 5+ years of embedded firmware development, including 3+ years focused on motor control or power electronics

  • Expert C development for real-time, resource-constrained systems; experience in C++ and Python is also valuable

  • Experience developing multithreaded firmware on an RTOS, including scheduling, synchronization, and interrupt handling for timing-critical tasks

  • Hands-on experience implementing FOC for PMSM/BLDC motors, including current-loop tuning and sensored or sensorless position estimation

  • Solid power electronics fundamentals: inverters, DC-DC converters, PWM techniques such as SVPWM, gate drivers, current and voltage sensing, and thermal behavior

  • Experience designing discrete-time control loops, filters, and observers, and modeling them in MATLAB/Simulink or Python

  • Experience with motor-control MCUs or DSPs (e.g., TI C2000, STM32, NXP) and communication protocols such as CAN, UART, SPI, and I2C

  • Experience with safety-critical systems, including protection, fault handling, and diagnostics for high-power hardware

  • Comfortable debugging at the hardware/firmware boundary with oscilloscopes, current and differential probes, power analyzers, and dynamometers

  • Creative problem solver who isn’t afraid to push boundaries and think differently, with high attention to detail

  • Great oral and written communication skills

  • Team player with high integrity and self-awareness, open to feedback and constantly striving to improve

Extra Credit

  • Experience with functional or appliance safety standards, such as IEC 60730 (Class B software), IEC 60335, IEC 61508, or ISO 26262

  • Experience managing regenerative energy in motor drives, such as braking resistor control and DC bus regulation

  • Experience with digitally controlled power conversion, such as PFC or DC-DC stages

  • Experience with unit testing, software- and hardware-in-the-loop (SIL/HIL) testing, Git, and CI tools such as Jenkins

  • Experience with EMC/EMI and safety compliance testing for motor drives

  • Experience with bootloaders and secure over-the-air firmware updates

  • Experience shipping high-volume consumer hardware

At Tonal, we believe that the unique and varied lived experiences of our teammates contribute to our overall strength. We don’t just appreciate differences, we celebrate them, and we always seek people that represent a wide variety of backgrounds. We’re dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and designing employee experiences that contribute to your growth as much as you do to ours. If your experience aligns with what we’re looking for (even if you don’t check every single box), send us your application. We would love to hear from you!

Tonal is committed to meeting the diverse needs of people with disabilities in a timely manner that is consistent with the principles of independence, dignity, integration, and equality of opportunity. Should you have any accommodation requests, please reach out to us via our confidential email, [email protected]. All requests will be addressed and responded to in accordance with Tonal’s Accessibility Policy and local legislation.

Source: Tonal on Ashby · View original posting (opens in new tab)

Pay in context

This role's base floor ($170,000) is above 72% of the 2,097 Engineering (non-software) roles in California listed on this site; 31 others list the same floor. Their median floor is $146,200; the middle half runs from $124,000 to $174,000.

Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 7, 2026.

This range next to 6 other live Tonal roles with the nearest advertised base floor
Chart as a table
This range next to 6 other live Tonal roles with the nearest advertised base floor
RolePublished base
Senior Power Electronics Firmware Engineer (this listing)$170K - $195K
Brand Design Lead$150K - $195K
Staff Solutions Architect, Business Systems$200K - $250K
Associate, Strategy & Corporate Development$130K - $160K
Senior Retail Marketing & Retail Partnerships Manager$120K - $155K
Head of People (Senior Director)$220K - $300K
Senior Manager, Software Engineering (Experiences)$230K - $275K

Same $100K to $400K scale as every card. All Tonal roles · How to read the bar

Observed changes

  1. Began meeting the published-salary criteria
  2. First observed on the employer's board
Observed since
Employer-stated posting date
2026-11-05
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: San Francisco, CA

USD 170,000 – 195,000 · 1 YEAR · Salary

Method
Structured pay field published by the employer
Checked
Rule set
us-base-v2

The employer's job board publishes this pay as a dedicated data field. We read the field directly; no interpretation was needed.

What we verified

  • The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
  • The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
  • The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.

We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.