Lead Kernel Engineer - Mobile OS Performance & Power

European Tech Recruit; Cambridgeshire and Peterborough; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

European Tech Recruit partners with a leading telecommunications R&D company in Cambridge to hire a Principal Kernel Engineer. The role focuses on deep kernel performance and power optimization across mobile platforms, owning core subsystems, and delivering production-grade patches.

You will work with CPU microarchitects, runtime engineers, and AI-driven optimization tools to push the boundaries of kernel efficiency and responsiveness on flagship workloads, including gaming and AI inference.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of OS kernel development in C (Linux or comparable).
• Expert-level understanding of MM internals: memory management, ordering, TLBs.
• Mastery of kernel synchronization: RCU, locking, ARM64 barriers.
• Proven kernel performance-analysis skills: PMU counters, ftrace/perf, eBPF.
• Strong ARM64 architecture grounding: cache, memory ordering, TLBs.
• Mobile/SoC power engineering: DVFS, cpuidle, energy attribution.
• Upstream Linux kernel contributions (MM, sched, locking).

Responsibilities

• Optimize memory management internals: buddy allocator, slab/SLUB, page reclaim, and memory defragmentation.
• Drive scheduler performance: run-queue, load balancing, energy-aware scheduling.
• Optimize synchronization primitives and lock-heavy paths: futex paths, mutexes, RCU, atomics.
• Analyse IPC and syscall paths: context-switch cost, shared memory, vDSO, interrupts.
• Identify bottlenecks on flagship mobile workloads: gaming, AI inference, camera using PMU counters and profiling.
• Land production-quality kernel patches from hypothesis through benchmarking.
• Collaborate with CPU microarchitects on HW-SW co-design and kernel-driven requirements.
• Contribute to AI-assisted kernel optimization pipelines.

Skills

Kernel development

C programming

Linux kernel

Performance analysis

ARM64

Power optimization

PMU counters

ftrace/perf

eBPF

Upstream contributions

Job description

European Tech Recruit partners with a leading telecommunications R&D company in Cambridge to hire a Principal Kernel Engineer. The role focuses on deep kernel performance and power optimization across mobile platforms, owning core subsystems, and delivering production-grade patches.

You will work with CPU microarchitects, runtime engineers, and AI-driven optimization tools to push the boundaries of kernel efficiency and responsiveness on flagship workloads, including gaming and AI inference.