Senior Embedded Linux Engineer

Apptronik • Austin, TX

4h

About The Position

At Apptronik, we are building humanoid robots that require an operating system as sophisticated and resilient as their hardware. As a Senior Embedded Linux Engineer, you will own the entire Linux platform ecosystem. You aren't just "using a build tool"; you are architecting a custom distribution from the ground up to ensure our robots are performant, secure, and field-ready.
Your mission is to manage the full lifecycle of the OS: from factory provisioning and secure imaging to real-time kernel tuning and reliable OTA updates. You will ensure that every cycle of the CPU is optimized for our control loops and that our fleet remains stable.

Requirements

• OS Construction: Proven ability to build a custom Linux distribution from scratch. You must understand how to manipulate every layer of the rootfs and toolchain.
• Build System: Experience Yocto/OpenEmbedded, Buildroot, or equivalent professional-grade embedded build environments.
• Kernel & Performance Tuning: Experience with PREEMPT_RT, core isolation (isolcpus), and tuning Linux for real-time robotics or industrial control.
• Nvidia Ecosystem: Deep familiarity with Nvidia Jetson hardware, including L4T, Jetpack SDK, and flashing utilities.
• Resiliency Engineering: Hands-on experience with OverlayFS, partition management, and fail-safe OTA update mechanisms.
• Security Engineering: Hands-on experience with LUKS disk encryption, TPM 2.0 integration, and managing PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) for embedded devices.
• Hardware Interfacing: Experience debugging hardware protocols (I2C, SPI, UART, USB) and wireless stacks (Bluetooth/BlueZ).
• Documentation & Process: A disciplined approach to documentation and creating repeatable engineering processes.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years of experience in Embedded Linux or Systems Engineering.
• Demonstrated experience shipping and maintaining a custom Linux OS on high-complexity physical hardware.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with "Modern DevOps" (Containerized build environments, GitLab CI, or automated hardware-in-the-loop testing).
• Knowledge of Secure Boot, disk encryption, and TPM integration.
• Knowledge of real time operating systems
• Programming experience in C++ and Python.

Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain a custom, production-grade Linux distribution using Yocto, Buildroot, or an equivalent professional build system.
• Demonstrate complete ownership of the OS layers, managing the relationship between the bootloader, kernel, board support packages (BSPs), and user-space libraries.
• Develop and maintain a highly repeatable and well-documented build process that serves as the single source of truth for all robot compute modules.
• Perform low-level kernel configuration and tuning to meet the strict latency requirements of humanoid robotics.
• Implement core isolation and process priority optimization to ensure critical control loops have deterministic access to resources.
• Optimize the OS footprint and resource utilization (CPU, memory, and I/O) to maximize the efficiency of our Nvidia Jetson (Jetpack) and AMD64 platforms.
• Integrate and debug hardware drivers for peripherals, including Bluetooth (BlueZ), Wi-Fi, and specialized robotics sensors.
• Architect the workflows for initial device provisioning, including secure boot initialization, disk partitioning, and factory imaging processes.
• Own the end-to-end Over-the-Air (OTA) update architecture (A/B atomic updates) using frameworks like Mender, RAUC, or SWUpdate.
• Implement OverlayFS or similar union-mount strategies to create a resilient, "unbreakable" system that supports read-only roots and safe factory resets.
• Architect and implement end-to-end Secure Boot chains (from BootROM to Kernel) using TPM 2.0 or Secure Enclaves to ensure only authenticated firmware and OS images execute on the robot.
• Implement Linux Security Modules (LSMs) such as SELinux or AppArmor to enforce mandatory access controls; utilize cgroups and namespaces to isolate critical robotics processes from non-critical telemetry.
• Manage the lifecycle of device identity and cryptographic keys; oversee disk encryption (dm-crypt/LUKS)
• Own the CI/CD pipeline for OS image generation, ensuring that builds are automated, tested, and traceable.
• Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for the platform architecture, build environment, and flashing procedures.
• Develop specialized diagnostic tools (Python/Bash) for system monitoring and field troubleshooting.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level