Senior Kernel Engineer

Flock

2d•$172,000 - $190,000•Onsite

About The Position

As Flock expands its next-generation hardware fleet across demanding outdoor environments, ensuring absolute operating system stability is critical to our camera networks. Deploying high-performance devices requires robust low-level chipset bring-up, custom bootloaders, and resilient kernel architectures. You will engineer low-level Qualcomm Android BSP solutions, optimize system performance, and build the foundational operating system powering our edge hardware. This isn't a high-level Android application or UI development role, you will focus entirely on low-level kernel space, bootloaders, HALs, and BSP bring-up. This is not a purely theoretical design role, you will directly debug physical devices, run CI builds, and deploy stable operating system builds directly to hardware. This isn't an isolated engineering position, you will collaborate constantly across electrical engineering, validation, and cloud teams to align hardware and software behavior.

Requirements

Mastery of C development and Linux kernel internals, including memory management, power management, IRQ handling, and subsystem architecture.
Hands-on experience with Qualcomm chipset bring-up, devicetrees, and Android system architecture spanning HAL and the Linux kernel.
Proficiency in bootloader development and customization, including familiarity with XBL and ABL concepts.
Experience developing or debugging firmware for Application Digital Signal Processors within embedded hardware environments.
A bachelor's, master's, or Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, or a related technical field is required.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Linux kernel drivers for SPI/I2C/UART, Rust/C++, or Qualcomm proprietary subsystems is a plus.

Responsibilities

Lead low-level Qualcomm Android BSP bring-up, devicetree modifications, and pSIM framework integrations across next-generation camera platforms.
Architect and customize low-level bootloaders, including XBL and ABL implementations, to optimize device boot security and efficiency.
Develop and debug firmware for Application Digital Signal Processors, aligning ADSP architecture with system processing requirements.
Partner with electrical engineering and validation teams to define low-level hardware integration, build custom debug hooks, and expand automated testing.
Analyze system tombstones, kernel logs, and performance traces to eliminate hardware-software latency and memory bottlenecks.