Staff Camera Software Engineer

Ford • Palo Alto, CA

2d • $150,200 - $283,500 • Hybrid

About The Position

Ford’s Electric Vehicles, Digital and Design (EVDD) team is charged with delivering the company’s vision of a fully electric transportation future. EVDD is customer-obsessed, entrepreneurial, and data-driven and is dedicated to delivering industry-leading customer experience for electric vehicle buyers and owners. You’ll join an agile team of doers pioneering our EV future by working collaboratively, staying focused on only what matters, and delivering excellence day in and day out. Join us to make positive change by helping build a better world where every person is free to move and pursue their dreams.

As a Staff Camera Software Engineer, you will take ownership of a Linux camera/ISP stack centered on the chipset vendor's ISP architecture. Your work will span V4L2 media pipeline implementation, firmware command/response integration, DMA-BUF and GPU-shared memory handling, sensor/CSI bring-up, and production-grade reliability fixes. This is a hands-on development role requiring deep kernel-space debugging, concurrency management, and hardware-software co-design. As a staff-level engineer, you will also serve as a technical leader setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and driving cross-team alignment on the camera/ISP roadmap.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.
• 10+ years of embedded systems experience, with a minimum of 5 years dedicated to Linux kernel driver development.
• Expert-level C programming in kernel space, including memory management, locking primitives (mutexes, spinlocks, RCU), workqueues, and interrupt handling.
• Production-level experience with the Linux media stack (V4L2 ioctls, Media Controller entities, and videobuf2).
• Hands-on experience with MIPI CSI-2 sensor and ISP bring-up.
• Strong knowledge of DMA-BUF, scatter-gather mapping, cache coherency, and kernel debugging tools (GDB, ftrace, lockdep).
• Solid understanding of Linux power management (runtime PM and suspend/resume).

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with vendor-specific GPU driver stacks, TTM memory models, and firmware mailbox protocols.
• Experience with automotive-grade reliability standards (such as ISO 26262).
• A track record of active contributions to the upstream Linux kernel.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction and long-term architecture strategy for a complex subsystem, balancing near-term delivery with future scalability.
• A track record of mentoring and elevating engineers, fostering strong engineering practices, and acting as a trusted technical voice across teams and with external partners.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain Linux kernel camera and ISP drivers utilizing V4L2, the Media Controller framework, and videobuf2 (vb2).
• Integrate and debug MIPI CSI-2 sensors and image pipelines to ensure optimal routing for preview, video, and Zero Shutter Lag (ZSL) paths.
• Implement and maintain robust firmware interfaces, managing command/response queues, interrupt processing, and work-thread synchronization.
• Manage the buffer lifecycle using MMAP, DMA-BUF import/export, zero-copy mechanisms, and fence signaling to minimize latency.
• Drive power management initiatives, including suspend/resume, runtime PM, and clock/power sequencing robustness for camera hardware subsystems.
• Diagnose and resolve complex kernel-space issues such as race conditions, memory leaks, deadlocks, and frame pipeline regressions.
• Build debug and observability tooling using debugfs, sysfs, ftrace tracepoints, custom counters, and system health metrics.
• Maintain high code quality through rigorous code reviews and technical documentation while collaborating closely with chipset vendors/silicon partners, camera sensor manufacturers, and user-space camera framework teams.

Benefits

• Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
• Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care and more
• Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more
• Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases
• Tuition assistance
• Established and active employee resource groups
• Paid time off for individual and team community service
• A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day
• Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.

What This Job Offers

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