Wireless Systems Engineer, Access Points

About the company

Efference provides high-performance perception and compute infrastructure for training and deploying robot models in the cloud. Our vision is to make robotic deployments scalable with shared compute.

We approach the problem by owning the entire path from the image sensor to the datacenter GPU. We shrink the load at the sensor, fix the uplink so robot traffic is fast and reliable, and clock synchronize the system so observations arrive time-aligned, ready for inference.

About the role

You'll build access points and coordinated wireless networks for robots that continuously send sensor data to shared compute over multiple paths. The work spans radio platform selection, firmware and driver development, and uplink scheduling that keeps observations moving as robots, interference, and fleet load change.

What you’ll do

• Define the access point architecture with electrical and RF engineers, select radio platforms, and bring up custom hardware from early boards through deployment.
• Develop MAC, firmware, and driver features for uplink scheduling, traffic prioritization, admission control, and airtime allocation across multiple robots.
• Build coordination between access points for handoffs, channel selection, and mesh or wired backhaul; measure the airtime cost and resilience of each topology.
• Develop beamforming, rate adaptation, and traffic distribution across radio links; evaluate MIMO and multi-path performance under obstruction, motion, and competing traffic.
• Work with client, UWB, and embedded engineers on clock distribution and location-assisted scheduling, with explicit limits for synchronization error and handoff interruption.
• Instrument queues, retransmissions, channel use, and observation delivery; reproduce field failures and improve tail latency and delivery rate under realistic load.

What we are looking for

• Experience developing Wi-Fi access points, wireless firmware, MAC algorithms, or comparable radio systems beyond network configuration.
• Strong understanding of 802.11 channel access, aggregation, retransmission, QoS, beamforming, mesh networks, and handoffs.
• Proficiency in C or C++ and hands-on work with embedded Linux, wireless drivers, or radio firmware.
• Experience bringing up hardware and using packet captures, firmware traces, and RF measurements to explain wireless failures.
• Ability to turn latency, capacity, and reliability requirements into experiments and implementation decisions.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Wi-Fi 6/7, uplink OFDMA or MU-MIMO, multi-link operation, or coordinated access points.
• Work with hostapd, mac80211/cfg80211, vendor wireless SDKs, or programmable radio platforms.
• Experience with industrial wireless deployments, timing protocols, or moving clients in dense multipath environments.
• Experience with 5G radio access or private cellular networks, including integration with Wi-Fi in multi-path systems.