Software Engineer, Embedded BSP/Kernel (Robotics OS)

Meta•Redmond, WA

1d•$219,000 - $301,000

About The Position

Meta Robotics Studio builds consumer humanoid robots that bring Meta's AI into the physical world. The Robotics OS team owns the software between the silicon and the robot learning stack. Robots run real-time control loops over EtherCAT while large vision-language-action models run on the GPU, and the team works to make that computing platform deterministic and reliable at every boot. The Software Engineer will help architect and evolve Robotics OS, Meta's build of NVIDIA Jetson Linux for Thor-class robot compute. The role contributes to the multi-year technical direction for the operating system, including how it is built, released, updated, and scaled from prototype labs to production fleets. It also shapes how one computer serves both real-time control and AI workloads. The engineer will collaborate with hardware, firmware, controls, and AI teams across Meta, as well as NVIDIA Jetson engineering teams. This is a hands-on role involving kernel-level debugging and board bring-up.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, a relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years of experience building and shipping system software for embedded Linux or Android-based products.
Experience architecting and owning an operating system, BSP, or platform software stack on a shipped hardware product.
Deep experience with C and Linux kernel internals, including device drivers, device tree, scheduling, interrupts, and memory management.
Proficiency in at least one of C++, Rust, or Python.
Experience driving new-SoC or new-board bring-up on ARM64, from boot chain through kernel to a production OS.
Experience designing OS image build and release systems, such as Yocto/OpenEmbedded, Buildroot, Debian packaging, or AOSP, including update and release-management strategy.
Experience debugging cross-layer problems spanning hardware, firmware, kernel, and user space.
Experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams or organizations, including external silicon or hardware vendors.

Nice To Haves

Experience growing a platform from prototype to production fleet scale.
A track record of upstream contributions to the Linux kernel, Yocto, or related open-source projects.
Experience designing secure boot, verified boot, and OTA/A/B update systems for a large device fleet.
Experience with EtherCAT, CAN-FD, or other robotics fieldbuses, and host-to-microcontroller architectures such as FreeRTOS or Zephyr.
GPU platform experience with CUDA, NVML/MIG, TensorRT, or deploying ML inference on edge devices alongside real-time workloads.
Deep hands-on experience with NVIDIA Jetson (Orin/Thor) and Jetson Linux/JetPack, including custom carrier-board bring-up, BCT/BPMP configuration, nvidia-oot, and flashing and mass-production tooling.
Experience with real-time Linux in production, including PREEMPT_RT, CPU and interrupt isolation, and latency analysis, in robotics, automotive, industrial, or other safety-critical systems.
Experience with Yocto/meta-tegra and hermetic build and CI systems.
Experience with AOSP or other mobile/XR OS platform work, including vendor BSP integration, HALs, SELinux, init, OTA, or kernel and vendor upgrade programs.

Responsibilities

Contribute to the technical strategy and multi-year roadmap for Robotics OS, covering the BSP, kernel, OS image, update system, real-time behavior, GPU platform, and fleet tooling across robot programs and compute platforms.
Architect the next-generation OS image, including migration to a Yocto/meta-tegra-based build that is reproducible, hermetic, secure, and efficient for engineer iteration.
Define and drive production update strategies, including atomic A/B and over-the-air updates, rollback, secure and verified boot, fusing and signing, and factory provisioning.
Shape the platform's real-time architecture, including allocation of CPU cores, interrupts, memory, and GPU resources between high-frequency control loops and AI models; establish latency budgets and measurement infrastructure.
Collaborate with NVIDIA Jetson engineering teams and Meta engineers to share requirements, push fixes upstream, and plan adoption of Jetson Linux and JetPack releases while minimizing fork debt.
Partner with electrical, firmware, and mechanical engineers on compute and carrier-board designs, advising on SoC configuration, interfaces, power, and thermal considerations.
Drive end-to-end bring-up of new boards and modules, including boot chain, BPMP and device tree, pinmux, PCIe/USB/Ethernet, power profiles, and robot-hardware drivers.
Set quality standards for the RT kernel and out-of-tree drivers, including kernel configuration, ABI compatibility, and plans to upstream changes or align with Meta's kernel.
Build reliability and observability capabilities, including crash and kernel-log capture, symbolization, boot-time tracing, health telemetry, and fleet triage tooling.
Provide design reviews, mentorship, and technical hiring; develop OS and embedded talent and help shape on-call and operational practices.