Software Engineer, Kernel Reliability - United States and Canada, United States
Originally posted 15 September 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role is for a hands-on software engineer to improve the reliability of compute clusters and underlying inference, training, and internal production services.
What you'll do
- Contribute to the technical roadmap and execution for kernel-centric reliability of internal and customer-facing systems.
- Partner with System and Cluster Operations teams to reduce system and service downtime after failure through tooling, analysis, and hands-on debugging support.
- Work with the Debug Team to enhance debug tools to speed up failure analysis.
- Collaborate with software teams to improve the software stack—including kernels—to improve on-field debugging and failure analysis.
- Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-mortems; drive follow-ups that measurably improve reliability over time.
What you'll need
- Strong programming skills in C/C++ and Python.
- Solid foundations in operating systems, computer architecture, and systems programming fundamentals.
- Ability to debug complex issues using logs, traces, and standard debugging workflows; interest in root-cause analysis.
Nice to have
- Exposure to parallel and distributed programming (message passing, multicore, GPU, embedded).
- Experience building or using debug/diagnostic tools (debuggers, core dump handling, tracing, sanitizers, profilers).
- Familiarity with debugging distributed and parallel applications (deadlocks, livelocks, race conditions).
- Knowledge of computer architecture concepts (instruction pipelining, multithreading, networking, memory systems).
- Familiarity with monitoring, incident response, and post-mortem culture.
This role has been open 31 days — well below the 59-day median for Systems Software Engineering roles.
Systems Software Engineering · Systems Software
|
Open roles in category
686
|
Median days open
59 d
|
Median salary
$213k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Cerebras | All employers we track in this specialty (686 roles · 71 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 13 | 686 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 73 | 6119 · 145 employers |
| Median days open | 82 d | 59 d (+23 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $213k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 169 open roles · median 78 d
- NVIDIA · 134 open roles · median 47 d
- AMD · 63 open roles · median 51 d
- Mobileye · 27 open roles · median 72 d
- Broadcom · 22 open roles · median 53 d
- Arm Holdings · 20 open roles · median 114 d
How we counted: 686 open Systems Software Engineering (Systems Software) roles from 71 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 17 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.