System Software Engineer, Linux Kernel and Device Drivers

MatX•Mountain View, CA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

MatX is building best-in-class silicon for high-performance and sustainable GenAI. The MatX host system software team owns everything that makes our AI silicon and systems usable, from Linux kernel drivers up through node and cluster management. The team also co-owns the BMC/OpenBMC firmware stack. We are looking for self-driven engineers who can take a hardware spec and a register map and start building prototype drivers, low-level utilities, daemons, and tooling with minimal hand-holding. Engineers on this team have a primary focus area, but ownership of overlapping components is shared, and you should expect to venture across the stack.

Requirements

BS or higher in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience, with 8+ years in low-level systems software
Strong hands-on Linux kernel development experience — you've written and shipped device drivers, ideally for PCIe devices
Strong C programming skills; comfortable in userspace and kernel space
Able to read hardware datasheets and register definitions and program a device from them, without waiting for someone to explain the hardware
Deep understanding of computer architecture and OS internals: MMIO, DMA, interrupts, IOMMU, memory hierarchy, processes/threads, virtual memory
Experienced debugging complex hardware/software interaction issues with limited visibility
Self-driven and comfortable with ambiguity — able to own a component from blank page through bring-up and validation on a small, fast-moving team
All candidates must be authorized to work in the United States and work from our offices in Mountain View Tuesdays-Thursdays.
This position requires access to information that is subject to U.S. export controls. This offer of employment is contingent upon the applicant's capacity to perform job functions in compliance with U.S. export control laws without obtaining a license from U.S. export control authorities.

Nice To Haves

Experience with pre-silicon validation environments (simulation, emulation, FPGA prototyping)
First-silicon or new-platform bring-up experience for accelerators, NICs, or SoCs
Familiarity with SR-IOV, dma-buf, peer-to-peer PCIe, or VFIO
Kernel performance tuning and profiling experience (perf, ftrace, eBPF)
Exposure to BMC/host interaction paths (e.g., in-band vs. out-of-band device access, sideband interfaces such as I2C/SMBus)
Rust for systems programming

Responsibilities

Architect, design, and implement the Linux kernel driver stack for MatX's AI accelerators (PCIe endpoint devices), including memory management, DMA, interrupt handling, and command submission paths
Build the low-level userspace libraries that sit directly on top of the driver — ioctl/sysfs interfaces, memory mapping, direct chip access utilities
Test and validate early chip features on pre-silicon platforms: software simulation, emulation, and FPGA environments
Write quick prototype code, debug utilities, and bring-up tooling to exercise the chip directly
Drive first-silicon bring-up side by side with hardware, BMC firmware, and platform engineers, debugging issues that span RTL, firmware, kernel, and userspace
Profile and optimize the host I/O path: PCIe throughput, DMA efficiency, interrupt latency, and OS overheads
Deliver unit and regression tests for kernel and library components
Expose driver-level device state and error information in ways the platform telemetry and management layers (and, where relevant, the BMC) can consume
Influence next-generation chip architecture by feeding software requirements back into silicon design
Share ownership of adjacent components with teammates — e.g., contributing to the chip initialization and telemetry daemons that build on your driver interfaces