About the job
About ALSO.
At ALSO, we are revolutionizing the future of electric mobility. Initially a part of Rivian, our dedicated team of innovators is focused on designing cutting-edge, vertically integrated small electric vehicles (EVs) that tackle today's global mobility challenges. Our vision is to inspire a shift towards more affordable, enjoyable, and 10-50 times more efficient transportation solutions.
As an Embedded Validation & Tools Engineer specializing in OTA, you will play a key role in ensuring the operational readiness and reliability of firmware and software updates across our fleet of embedded devices. Your responsibilities will include designing and executing validation test programs that guarantee OTA updates are secure, robust, and reliable in real-world scenarios, including handling network interruptions, power failures, device restarts, and critical edge cases. You will collaborate closely with Firmware, Release, QA, and Cloud teams to ensure seamless communication from release to fleet health.
Key Responsibilities
Develop and execute comprehensive OTA validation plans across various device families and release types (full OS images, firmware updates, bootloader updates, A/B updates, and delta/patch updates).
Build, manage, and scale automated test environments (including hardware-in-the-loop, virtual devices, and emulators) to conduct regression, integration, and stress tests for OTA processes.
Automate end-to-end OTA pipelines (from build artifact signing and staging to rollout and post-update verification) using Python, shell scripting, and CI tools.
Validate update mechanisms and components: bootloader, update agent, package formats, rollbacks, A/B partitions, and recovery modes.
Test update resilience under challenging conditions, including intermittent networks (cellular/Wi-Fi), high latency, power interruptions, low battery scenarios, storage limitations, and corrupted images.
Ensure security compliance through the validation of signing/verification processes, secure transport (TLS), secure boot, key management, and assessment of vulnerabilities introduced by update components.
Define and track metrics and KPIs (success rate, rollback rate, mean time to recover, time-to-update); instrument devices and cloud backends to measure rollout health, and generate release readiness reports.
Conduct root cause analysis on update failures, reproduce field issues, and facilitate remediation with firmware and backend engineering teams.

