Principal Kernel Engineer: Mobile Performance & Power

European Tech Recruit; Cambridgeshire and Peterborough; On-site; GBP 130,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

European Tech Recruit is seeking a Principal Kernel Engineer in Cambridge to drive kernel performance and power optimization across core subsystems. You will own memory management, scheduling, IPC, and synchronization, analyzing behavior down to microarchitectural level and landing production-ready optimizations for responsiveness and battery life.

This hands-on role involves working with CPU microarchitects and AI-driven optimization tooling to ship patches with measurable latency and energy

Qualifications

• 10+ years of OS kernel development in C with patches shipped to production systems at scale.
• Expert-level understanding of MM internals: physical/virtual memory management, buddy and slab allocation, reclaim, page tables, TLB management.
• Mastery of kernel synchronization: locking primitives, RCU, lock-free techniques, the ARM64 memory model and barrier semantics.
• Proven kernel performance-analysis skills: PMU counters, ftrace, perf, eBPF, lock contention and latency analysis.
• Strong ARM64 architecture grounding: exception levels, cache hierarchy and maintenance, TLBs, memory ordering.
• Mobile power engineering: DVFS governors, cpuidle, per-workload energy attribution.
• Upstream Linux kernel contributions (mm, sched, locking, or related subsystems).
• Familiarity with HarmonyOS or Android common kernel.
• Exposure to CPU microarchitecture and cycle-accurate modelling (gem5).
• Experience with LLM/agentic tooling applied to systems software.

Responsibilities

• Optimize kernel subsystems for performance and power on flagship mobile platforms.
• Land production-quality kernel patches from hypothesis to ship with measured latency/energy impact.
• Collaborate with CPU microarchitects on HW-SW co-design.
• Analyse allocator, scheduler, and synchronization hot paths; optimize IPC and syscall paths.
• Identify bottlenecks on mobile workloads using PMU counters and tracing tools.
• Contribute to AI-assisted kernel optimization pipelines.

Skills

OS kernel dev

MM internals

Kernel synchronization

Performance analysis

ARM64 architecture

Mobile power

Upstream kernel

HarmonyOS/Android kernel

CPU microarchitecture

LLM tooling

Job description

European Tech Recruit is seeking a Principal Kernel Engineer in Cambridge to drive kernel performance and power optimization across core subsystems. You will own memory management, scheduling, IPC, and synchronization, analyzing behavior down to microarchitectural level and landing production-ready optimizations for responsiveness and battery life.

This hands-on role involves working with CPU microarchitects and AI-driven optimization tooling to ship patches with measurable latency and energy