Senior / Staff Linux Embedded Engineer

Senior / Staff Linux Embedded Engineer

Palo Alto, California

Senior Linux Embedded Engineer

Role Overview

We are a high-growth company seeking a versatile Senior (or Staff) Embedded Software Engineer to support vertical-specific customizations and platform stability for our production wearable systems. This is a hands-on individual contributor role requiring a generalist capable of navigating system boundaries—from kernel-level debugging to back-end logic and application tailoring.

The ideal candidate brings deep experience with Embedded Linux environments and physical hardware validation. While our next-generation architecture leverages the Go programming language, candidates with strong fundamental computer science and C/C++ backgrounds are highly encouraged to apply.

Responsibilities

• System Customization: Lead technical alignment and vertical-specific applications deployment on our production Yocto-based Embedded Linux distribution.
• Hardware Integration: Support board bring-up and physical hardware validation using low-level protocols, ensuring seamless mapping from simulation to actual edge devices.
• System Architecture: Collaborate across firmware and application boundaries, leveraging containerized runtime architectures (Docker/Podman) for Edge OS environment isolation.
• Code Optimization: Debug and resolve multi-processor resource contentions across execution domains (CPU efficiency cores, DSP, NPU), emphasizing power management and thread execution priority adjustments.
• Process Excellence: Champion strict code quality standards, comprehensive version control processes (Git pull requests, cherry-picking), and early continuous integration pipeline validation.

Required Skills and Experience

• Experience: 6+ years of hands-on embedded software development experience, primarily with Embedded Linux distributions.
• Systems Programming: Command of C/C++ with strong computer science fundamentals, runtime architecture optimization, and pointer tracking knowledge.
• Linux Infrastructure: Solid familiarity with embedded build environments (Yocto Project, recipes, device trees) and low-level system diagnostic tools (GDB, strace, dmesg).
• Hardware Protocols: Direct experience interface debugging with communication topologies, including I2C, SPI, UART, USB, and GPIO.
• Workflow Tooling: Advanced proficiency with Git, team collaboration development flows, and structural code reviews.

Preferred / "Nice-to-Have" Skills

• Go Lang: Prior experience with or conceptual familiarity with the Go programming language (concurrency, dynamic memory footprint tracking). Alternatively, background with Rust or complex multi-threaded architectures.
• Container Deployments: Exposure to lightweight virtualization constraints and container orchestrations on target edge endpoints (Podman, Docker).
• Power Management: Experience profiling embedded execution workloads, process scheduling manipulation, and low-power constraint validation.