Applying for a job at Espressif India

Espressif opened up an office in India unofficially in September '17. It had its first Indian hires before that, but there was no single place for them to work out off. In the last 18 months, we have grown from a team of 4 to a team of 30 and are growing quite rapidly (which is good news).

There are a couple of things about Espressif that make it the company that it is, and understanding them is important if you would like to work here.

Software

1. A few people at Espressif were hired because they were doing some dope open-source work around its chipsets on the outside. Typically, these are not one-off projects, but libraries or frameworks that helped the people themselves as well as others.
2. At Espressif, we work hard on exposing the hardware features through our various software SDKs. If you are a software engineer, you need to understand that we are the ones who write almost all of ESP-IDF,  ESP8266 RTOS SDK, and more. This means that we spend very little time building end-user applications. You should ideally have experience building foundational layers.
3. First principles matter. A lot. We work on chipsets that make things previously impossible on microcontrollers possible. That means that you will have to rewrite, rethink, and break barriers at a systems level. You should have a pretty good understanding of how a computer works. This includes - what goes in RAM, what goes in flash, what are the impacts of you not freeing your mallocs, what does a function stack look like, how to work with registers, good debugging practices like openocd and gdb and more.
4. C is something that we use heavily. C++ is very different from C. Arduino code is typically C++.
   We don't do a lot of Arduino or C++ at Espressif -

Having worked on ESP32/ESP8266 to build projects doesn't necessarily mean that one has the same skillsets that are required for working on ESP-IDF or ESP8266 RTOS SDK or other sdks that we have here.

Generic

1. Espressif is very fast moving, that means that people here don more hats than one at a time(this is true of all good startups). Too much of "jack of all trades" is not desirable though. Ideally, folks who are "jack of all trades, master of one/two" work out great in such environments.
2. Peer reviews play a key role. That means that whatever work you do will have to be clean, without any workarounds or 'hacks', and pretty well documented. Attention to detail is everything. Typically the first merge request that someone does here gets a lot of comments, and it can be frustrating. But it's all worth it.
3. Open source is very important to us. A lot of us were made by it, and we firmly believe that it is the right way forward for pretty much everything that we do here at Espressif. Identifying with the values of FOSS is kind of important if you are to work here.
4. We have a strong sense of ownership of what we do. For example, it means that if I am responsible for a plant or a tree here, it's my job to prune it, water it, nurture it, make it work well with other trees in the garden too.

I am I believe the 4th employee at Espressif India (Kewal, Amey, Kedar, and then me). In the last 18 months, I have been lucky to see how a company grows, how the responsibilities grow, and how a team scales. We are growing faster than before now, and we need smart, gritty folks to come join us and build the future of the Internet connected devices.

We have a bunch of openings on LinkedIn (not just for our India office) - check it out here