5 hours ago
South San Francisco, CA, USASenior / Staff+
H1B sponsor
Base Salary
$17k - $230k/yr
Responsibilities
- Diagnose crashes, hangs, races, driver failures, and performance or timing issues across the deployed fleet.
- Develop, debug, maintain, and own Linux kernel drivers and related subsystems.
- Bring up new hardware, including device-tree configuration, firmware interfaces, and board-support software.
- Design and verify fault detection, containment, recovery, watchdog, and graceful-degradation behavior on real hardware.
- Build diagnostics, benchmarks, automated tests, and validation systems that detect regressions before release.
- Improve latency, throughput, CPU and memory utilization, and networking performance.
- Review kernel and driver changes, maintain the patch stack across kernel upgrades, and contribute patches upstream.
- Lead cross-team technical decisions, write design documents, mentor engineers, and set kernel and platform direction at the Staff level.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional Linux kernel experience, including end-to-end ownership of a driver, subsystem, or hardware bring-up.
- Strong C skills and deep knowledge of kernel internals, including scheduling, interrupts, concurrency, memory management, DMA, MMIO, and the Linux device model.
- Experience debugging real hardware and using datasheets or interface specifications to identify root causes.
- Fluency with ftrace, perf, dynamic debug, crash analysis, and data-driven fix validation.
- Experience with the upstream kernel patch workflow.
- Experience writing design documents, leading cross-team technical efforts, and mentoring engineers.
- Clear written and verbal communication skills, including explaining complex kernel issues to non-kernel specialists.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Preferred experience includes PCIe, Ethernet/NIC drivers, DMA, IOMMU, MSI/MSI-X, Linux networking, Embedded Linux, ARM64, device trees, board bring-up, real-time systems, PREEMPT_RT, latency analysis, eBPF, XDP, high-performance networking, kernel CI, stress testing, performance regression testing, upstream contributions, product-kernel maintenance, hardware debugging tools, firmware, bootloaders, or test-automation scripting.
Benefits
- Starting cash range is listed as $170,00-$230,000, with final pay depending on experience, qualifications, skills, location, and projected impact.
- Total compensation may include equity, overtime pay, discretionary annual or performance bonuses, sales incentives, medical, dental, and vision insurance, and paid time off.
- The role supports work across hardware, firmware, platform, networking, and flight-software teams on safety-critical autonomous aircraft systems.
About Zipline
Zipline designs, builds, and operates autonomous drone delivery systems for healthcare, retail, and public-sector customers. The privately held company runs end-to-end logistics—aircraft, software, and fulfillment—to deliver blood, vaccines, medicines, and consumer goods. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in South San Francisco, Zipline operates across multiple continents; notable work includes Rwanda’s national blood deliveries and U.S. home delivery pilots with Walmart.