Staff Software Engineer – Core OS, Vehicle Compute

Description

The company designs and builds vehicles and the software that runs them. This is a newly formed Core OS group creating the operating system foundation for its software-defined vehicles.

As a founding engineer on a staff-level role, you will help set technical direction from the start. The platform lets embedded Linux, Android and QNX share vehicle compute safely and efficiently.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for a new platform covering the hypervisor, guest OS support, resource partitioning, the boot and secure-boot chain, the container runtime, and health and fault management.
• The architecture you choose will become the base every vehicle software team builds on. You will work across boundaries most engineers never touch, from guest to host, software to silicon, and between partitions with different safety requirements.
• Take ownership of key hypervisor and virtual machine features, including VM definitions, CPU and memory partitioning, device assignment and passthrough, and virtio device models.
• Design and tune communication between virtual machines using shared memory, message passing and virtualized I/O, aiming for throughput, low latency and deterministic behavior.
• Enable and maintain guest operating systems on embedded Linux (including Yocto-based distributions), Android and QNX, giving each consistent access to platform services, time sync, lifecycle control, interfaces and developer tools.
• Build and optimize the boot and secure-boot chain across partitions, covering startup sequencing, boot speed and platform-integrity verification.
• Develop platform services for resource governance, health monitoring, watchdogs, fault detection, fault handling and recovery that meet automotive safety and availability requirements.
• Build container runtime and workload management for in-vehicle applications, covering isolation, resource limits, lifecycle, updates and rollbacks.
• Profile and debug CPU, memory, I/O and interrupt behavior across the virtualized stack. Lead root-cause analysis with traces, logs and low-level tools across guest OSes, hypervisors, firmware and silicon.
• Raise engineering quality through CI/CD, bench and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) automation, validation strategy, Git and GitHub workflows and code reviews. Mentor engineers and work with silicon enablement, guest OS, board support package (BSP), functional safety and cybersecurity teams.

Requirements

• A bachelor's degree in a relevant field such as computer science or electrical engineering, or equivalent hands-on experience.
• 10+ years of professional work in embedded, systems or kernel-level software, including production code in automotive or similarly complex embedded domains.
• Deep operating-system work on Arm-based SoCs, with experience in several of these: hypervisor integration, VM configuration and device virtualization; real-time operating systems and deterministic scheduling; Linux kernel subsystems and configuration; bootloaders, secure boot and startup sequencing.
• Experience shipping commercial embedded systems with Yocto or a comparable embedded build system.
• Strong skill in performance tuning and hard debugging, including root-cause analysis across hardware, firmware, hypervisors, kernels and user space.
• Hands-on work with build and development tools: Git, GitHub, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing and release-quality engineering for platform software.
• Strong C and C++, plus working knowledge of Python and shell scripting for automation, tooling and debugging.
• Proven technical leadership through architecture work, mentoring, design and code reviews, and cross-team delivery.
• Clear written and spoken communication, with the ability to influence technical decisions and explain complex system topics.
• Preferred: a master's degree in computer science, electrical or computer engineering, or a related field.
• Preferred: hands-on work with hypervisors such as Gunyah, QNX Hypervisor, Xen or KVM/Arm, including virtio device model development.
• Preferred: experience with the QNX Software Development Platform (SDP), Android Open Source Project (AOSP), Android Automotive or Yocto as guest environments on virtualized platforms.
• Preferred: automotive functional safety experience, such as ISO 26262, ASIL, freedom from interference, safety islands or health-monitoring frameworks.
• Preferred: automotive cybersecurity experience, including ISO/SAE 21434.
• Preferred: container runtime experience with OCI-compliant runtimes, Podman or systemd-based isolation in resource-constrained environments.
• Preferred: familiarity with trusted execution environments, secure-boot chains and key management on embedded platforms.
• Preferred: Rust experience in systems or safety-relevant work.
• Preferred: strong command-line skills in Linux or UNIX, including GDB, perf, ftrace, strace and hypervisor-level tracing.
• Preferred: contributions to open-source virtualization or operating-system projects.

Conditions

This is a hybrid role. You are expected to report to a specific location at least 3 times a week, or at a frequency your manager sets.

The salary range is $160,200 to $330,400. This is a good-faith estimate under applicable state law. Your starting base pay will fall within that range based on job-related factors and the geography of the selected candidate.

Candidates may be required to complete a role-related assessment and/or a pre-employment screening before starting.

The company is committed to a workplace free of unlawful discrimination that fosters inclusion and belonging.

Benefits

• Incentive pay based on company performance, job level and individual performance.
• Medical, dental and vision coverage, a Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Accounts.
• A retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, and paid vacation and holidays.
• Tuition assistance, an employee assistance program, vehicle discounts and more.
• Relocation benefits for candidates who qualify under company policy.