Rust Engineer

Fast Forward; Cambridge; On-site; GBP 65,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Employer pension (12.5% cap)

33 days holiday

Private medical insurance

Group income protection

Life insurance

Sabbatical after 4 years

Job summary

lowRISC, a Cambridge-based non-profit, is seeking skilled software engineers to work on RISC-V firmware, toolchains, and embedded OS development. You will contribute across the stack, from firmware to cloud-based tests, and help advance open-source silicon building blocks.

Ideal candidates have strong Rust expertise, low-level systems knowledge, and experience with open source projects. English communication is essential; familiarity with LLVM, Bazel, and CI/CD for embedded systems is a plus.

Qualifications

• Must have strong Rust skills with ownership, lifetimes, concurrency, and memory management.
• Experience with open source projects and contribution habits.
• Excellent written and spoken English.
• Experience with embedded or resource-constrained environments or real-time systems.

Skills

Rust programming

C language

Open source contributions

English proficiency

Low-level systems programming

Tools

LLVM

QEMU

Bazel

Nix

CI/CD

Job description

At lowRISC we believe that open source development can transform the semiconductor industry. To help achieve this vision of production-ready, commercial-grade chips and silicon building blocks, we employ a software team with a wide range of skills.

Our software engineers work across the full software stack, from firmware and toolchains that interact directly with hardware to cloud-based infrastructure that tests our products at scale. These include work in areas such as:

• RISC-V firmware and driver development.
• Software hardening and security tools.
• Embedded operating systems (in Rust and C).
• Compilers, code generators, and linters.
• Simulators and emulators (e.g. QEMU).
• Electronic design automation (EDA) tools.
• Performance and code size analysis.
• Cloud-based infrastructure (such as continuous integration pipelines).

lowRISC is a non-profit Community Interest Company. With a business model that includes member fees and engineering services, we have shown that it is possible to run world-leading projects collaboratively for everyone's benefit. Originally a spinout from Cambridge University's Computer Lab, our UK team is based in Cambridge and our Switzerland team is based in Zurich.

Our Ibex CPU and OpenTitan Root of Trust projects have been taken to production silicon, partnering with world-leading organisations including Google, combining open-source approaches with best-practice chip design methodologies.

Requirements

• Highly proficient in Rust programming; deep understanding of fundamental concepts such as the ownership model, lifetimes, concurrency, parallelism, memory management and procedural macros.
• Solid knowledge of the Rust ecosystem, including tools and libraries.
• A high standard of written and spoken English.

Preferred or highly valued

• Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining large-scale or modular Rust codebases.
• Expert understanding of unsafe Rust, FFI, and low-level systems programming.
• Strong proficiency in C; familiarity with C++ and Python are a plus.
• Solid understanding of compiler internals; experience with LLVM is a plus.
• Experience with build systems and reproducible tooling (e.g. Bazel, Nix, uv).
• Experience developing for embedded or resource-constrained environments, including real-time systems.
• Familiarity with CI/CD for embedded or systems software.
• Strong knowledge of computer architecture; some experience with assembly languages (x86, RISC-V); familiarity with hardware design is a plus.
• Good knowledge of Linux.
• Experience contributing to open source projects.
• Higher degree levels and academic research experience are highly valued.

Benefits

Salary dependent upon experience.

Benefits include a generous employer pension contribution (up to 12.5% subject to an employee contribution via salary sacrifice of 6%), holiday allowance (33 days, pro rata, including public holidays), private medical insurance, group income protection, life insurance and a 4 week paid sabbatical after 4 years of service.

The team is based in Cambridge, UK, amongst the Silicon Fen's ecosystem of high tech start ups. Our office is in the heart of the city and a short walk from the train station.

We do not discriminate against any employee or candidate because of race, colour, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or any other protected characteristic. Please let us know if you need any adjustments made to the application or selection process. We will be happy to help.