Staff Embedded Linux Software Engineer

SirenOpt•San Leandro, CA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

SirenOpt is seeking a Staff Embedded Linux Software Engineer to join its small, high-impact firmware team, building the embedded software stack for a commercial bench-top scientific instrument. The platform is an AMD/Xilinx FPGA SoC (Zynq / UltraScale+) running PetaLinux, with userspace applications, device drivers, and real-time control interfacing with custom programmable logic. The role’s core mandate is to share the Linux application workload, own test automation infrastructure, and establish CI/build reliability. It combines production software development with tooling that verifies the software, and includes hands-on lab work with prototype hardware alongside desk-based development. The team follows a sequenced release cadence (HDL → OS/drivers → embedded applications → system integration). The engineer will work alongside an embedded systems architect who owns the Linux application layer, peripheral subsystems, protocol design, and hardware integration. The team is documentation-driven and uses Jira and Confluence to track work.

Requirements

Bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related field.
10+ years of relevant industry experience.
Experience with C for embedded Linux userspace, including threading, IPC, and POSIX APIs.
Python experience for test automation using pytest or an equivalent framework.
TCP/IP socket programming on Linux, including non-blocking I/O, connection lifecycle, and streaming.
UDP experience for discovery and lightweight telemetry.
Experience with UART, SPI, I2C, and CAN bus and serial protocols.
RS-232 and RS-485 experience, including byte-level protocol implementation such as framing, CRC, state machines, and multi-device arbitration.
Hardware bring-up and board-level debugging experience using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and protocol analyzers.
Experience with producer-consumer and ring buffer patterns for real-time data flow.
Hardware-in-the-loop test development and execution experience.

Nice To Haves

Linux DMA programming, including scatter-gather, buffer pool management, and AXI-DMA.
Experience with CI/CD tooling such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, and Docker-based build environments.
Yocto or PetaLinux BSP experience.
Experience with C unit test frameworks such as gtest, cmocka, or Unity.
Familiarity with FPGA register interfaces such as UIO, devmem, and register maps.
Performance profiling and network analysis experience, including Wireshark and throughput characterization.
Python GUI development for test or operator tooling, using Tkinter or PyQt.
Familiarity with scientific or process-control instrumentation.

Responsibilities

Develop embedded Linux application software in C for userspace and POSIX environments.
Develop userspace and kernel-space drivers for internal and external devices, including sensors, actuators, and instruments.
Implement and extend application-level command, control, and data protocols over TCP/IP.
Implement communication drivers for industrial instruments over serial and CAN interfaces.
Design, build, and maintain hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) automated test systems.
Develop host-side test tooling, including Python GUIs, emulators, and scripted instrument drivers.
Establish and maintain CI/CD pipelines and reproducible build infrastructure.
Participate in hardware bring-up, board-level validation, and lab bench debugging.
Contribute to architecture decisions, documentation, and design reviews.
Write clear design documentation and track progress in Jira and Confluence.