Senior Staff Software Engineer, Linux Kernel - San Francisco, Bay Area OR Pittsburgh, PA, United States
$220,000 - $270,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 6 October 2026 by the employer.
Own the kernel-mode driver that brings the Fabric accelerator to life.
About the role
As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, Linux Kernel, you will own the kernel-mode driver for the Fabric accelerator at Efficient Computer, bringing up new silicon in QEMU, functional simulation, emulation, and FPGA environments.
What you'll do
- Design, implement, and maintain the Linux kernel-mode driver for the Fabric accelerator, including device discovery, MMIO interfaces, interrupt handling, and power management.
- Define how custom hardware accelerators are exposed to Linux through ioctl and sysfs interfaces, and manage submission and synchronization models.
- Implement the unified memory model between ARM cores and the Fabric accelerator.
- Own SMMU (IOMMU) integration, including stream and context configuration, page table management, and fault handling.
- Build and maintain QEMU device models and board definitions for the Fabric and its SoC.
- Lead kernel-side bring up on first silicon, validating MMIO map, interrupts, clocks, resets, and memory against hardware specifications.
- Establish kernel-level test coverage, including driver unit tests, emulation-based regression suites, and hardware-in-the-loop validation.
What you'll need
- 7+ years of systems software experience with significant hands-on Linux kernel-mode driver development for complex devices.
- Deep understanding of Linux kernel memory management, including cache coherence, IOMMU/SMMU configuration, and unified or shared virtual memory.
- Hands-on experience with QEMU, emulation, or simulation environments, including writing or extending device models and board definitions.
- Experience with pre-silicon hardware bring up and first-silicon enablement.
- Experience designing runtime interfaces between kernel and user space: ABI and HAL design, synchronization, memory sharing, and error handling.
- Strong kernel debugging skills across crash analysis, tracing, hardware debuggers, and race and memory-corruption diagnosis.
- Fluency with memory-mapped I/O: register-level programming, ordering and barrier semantics, and interrupt handling.
- Experience interfacing custom hardware accelerators to Linux.
- Strong experience with ARM cores and the ARM architecture (AArch64, exception levels, GIC, SMMU, cache and memory attributes).
- Solid understanding of the Linux boot flow: boot firmware, device tree, kernel initialization, and early platform enablement.
- Expert C and strong scripting skills.
Nice to have
- Experience with FPGA prototyping and hardware emulation platforms (Palladium, Zebu, Veloce, or similar).
- Knowledge of dataflow, spatial, or other novel compute architectures.
- Experience working on a CUDA, ROCm, or other language runtime software stack.
This role has been open 9 days — well below the 60-day median for Systems Software Engineering roles.
Systems Software Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
692
|
Median days open
60 d
|
Median salary
$213k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Efficient Computer | All employers we track in this specialty (692 roles · 71 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 3 | 692 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 4 | 6156 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 9 d | 60 d (−51 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $213k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 172 open roles · median 78 d
- NVIDIA · 135 open roles · median 48 d
- AMD · 63 open roles · median 50 d
- Mobileye · 27 open roles · median 71 d
- Broadcom · 21 open roles · median 52 d
- Arm Holdings · 20 open roles · median 113 d
How we counted: 692 open Systems Software Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 71 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 16 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.