Senior Software Engineer - Motion Systems

BREAKFAST is a kinetic artist whose work merges engineering, motion, and creativity. His sculptures are commissioned and collected by leading global brands and institutions, including Harvard University, Rockefeller Center, Tiffany & Co., and Royal Caribbean — all designed and built by the team at his studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The role

BREAKFAST's artworks are physical: thousands of motors, each with its own controller, moving in sync, fed by live data, installed in places we can't easily get to, expected to run for a decade. The software goes from a control loop on a microcontroller to a Python service on a Linux box to a fleet of hundreds of installations reachable only over VPN. Today that whole vertical is held by a very small team. You'll work alongside the engineer who holds it now, learn it top to bottom, and grow into leading it.

That means the firmware that makes a motor move well — step generation, encoder supervision, homing, thermal and current management — and the host: services, packaging, provisioning, remote updates, camera and sensor pipelines, the tools technicians use in the field. You won't do all of it on day one. Within a year you'll be able to do all of it, and over time you'll help decide how it should be done.

What you'll work on

• The whole stack, end to end: brick firmware, bus bridges, host services, fleet tooling
• Motion: the control loops and the motion algorithms that make a mechanical thing feel alive
• The host: Debian-based controllers, Python 3 services, ZMQ/gRPC, packaging and deployment across a fleet
• Reliability: tests where there are none, bootloaders that update safely in place, the field failure that doesn't recur
• Tools for people who aren't engineers: the technician on site, the artist at the desk
• Installs: you'll stand in a lobby at 2 a.m. with a laptop, sometimes
  

What you bring

• 7+ years shipping hardware or systems that run in the field, and a history of owning a system — the person who was called when it broke
• Serious C on microcontrollers or serious Linux systems and Python — and a demonstrated ability to learn the other one fast. If you've owned a motor control loop, say so. If you haven't but you want to, say that
• Distributed-systems instincts: buses, protocols, timing, what happens when a packet is late
• The habit of writing down what you decided and why
• A recommendation at the end of your proposal, not a question
• You make the people around you better, and they like working with you. You'll join a small senior team that cares about the work
  

Probably not the right fit if

• You're happiest going deep on one layer and handing the rest across the wall
• You want a platform team between your code and production
• You've never been near the hardware. This job smells like solder
• You need to be told what to build. Here, someone brings a few chords; you bring your instrument
  

Nice to have

• Trinamic-class stepper drivers, encoders and homing. RS-485 or CAN. STM32 HAL
• Vision pipelines (ZED, Jetson, CUDA). KiCad literacy. MIDI — one of the pieces is an instrument
• Time around creative work — an installation studio, an artist's practice, a place where the thing you built was looked at. You know the difference between working and finished
  

The basics

• Full-time, on-site at the Brooklyn Navy Yard
• $170,000–$200,000 base depending on experience, plus an annual profit-share pool that every full-time person at the studio participates in
• Health, dental, and vision insurance, 401k, FSA
• Generous holiday policies
• Occasional travel to installs

When you apply, send a link to code you wrote, or be ready to walk us through something you built.

If you've built something that moved and it mattered to you how it looked while it did, reach out. Trust that signal.