Senior Embedded Linux Engineer

Location: Torrance, California, United States

Salary: $165,000–$231,000 USD per year, plus equity consideration

Company

Defense technology company designing and manufacturing high-performance unmanned systems and FPV drones for modern battlefield applications.

What you will do

• Own the embedded Linux distribution and board support packages using Yocto or Buildroot, from board bring-up through safe field updates.
• Maintain kernel configuration, device drivers, device trees, bootloaders, secure boot, and update/recovery paths.
• Design common runtime libraries and interfaces for logging, telemetry, IPC, and configuration.
• Maintain the cross-compilation toolchain and SDK consumed by flight, ground-station, and autonomy software teams.
• Bring up new compute platforms from first power-on to production-ready OS images.
• Define Linux platform best practices and mentor engineers across teams.

Requirements

• Deep experience building and shipping products with custom embedded Linux images using Yocto or Buildroot.
• Kernel-level expertise with device drivers, device trees, and debugging kernel or boot failures on physical hardware.
• Experience with U-Boot or similar bootloaders, including secure boot and safe update/recovery design.
• Strong C programming skills and familiarity with both kernel and user-space development; scripting with Python or shell.
• Board bring-up experience, from schematic review of a new SoC or SoM to a stable booting operating system.
• Experience designing stable libraries, SDKs, or interfaces consumed by other engineering teams.

Nice to have

• Radio or communications integration on embedded Linux.
• Real-time tuning with PREEMPT_RT and latency analysis.
• OTA and update systems such as Mender, RAUC, SWUpdate, OSTree, or equivalent solutions.
• Upstream contributions to the Linux kernel, Yocto/OpenEmbedded, or U-Boot.
• Rust systems programming or experience flying FPV, RC, or other drones.

Culture & Benefits

• Fast-paced, hands-on engineering environment focused on moving capabilities from design to deployment.
• High ownership and close iteration between product design and manufacturing.
• Work on unmanned systems built and tested for large-scale defense applications.
• Highly competitive equity grants are considered part of total compensation.