Engineer, Staff - Linux Kernel

Qualcomm; Hyderabad; On-site; INR 450,000 - 700,000; Full time

Job summary

Qualcomm India Private Limited seeks a Staff Engineer to lead power and performance optimizations on compute chipsets via upstream Linux. You will work across Hardware, Kernel, and OS teams to characterize, debug, and optimize performance under power and thermal constraints.

You will mentor a small team, contribute to upstream Linux discussions, and drive end‑to‑end performance KPIs with hands‑on engineering. This is a fully technical leadership role in a fast‑moving compute environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of Linux software development with focus on Arm.
• Deep Linux kernel understanding: scheduling, memory, power mgmt.
• Experience upstreaming patches to the Linux kernel.
• Exposure to virtualization (KVM) and containers (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong debugging using ftrace, perf, kgdb, crash and related tools.

Responsibilities

• Lead performance optimization for compute devices, mentoring team.
• Drive boot optimizations to meet product demands and reliability.
• Implement use‑case optimizations based on real workloads and profiling.
• Tune memory performance and manage latency/fragmentation.
• Own KPIs for power and performance; prevent regressions through testing.

Skills

Linux kernel fundamentals

Arm architecture

Upstream patching

Virtualization (KVM)

Container technologies (Docker, K8s)

Debugging and profiling

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/EE or related

Master's degree in Engineering (CS/EE) or related

PhD in Engineering (CS/EE) or related

Tools

ftrace

perf

kgdb

crash

trace tools

Job description

Company:

Qualcomm India Private Limited

Job Area:

Engineering Group > Software Engineering

General Summary:

We are looking for a highly skilled and experienced Staff Engineer to lead and deliver power and performance optimizations on our compute chipsets using upstream Linux. This role is ideal for a fully hands‑on technical leader with compute experience and who is passionate about delivering measurable performance and power improvements on production systems using upstream Linux. Work involves intersection of Hardware, Kernel, and Upstream Linux to characterize, debug, and optimize system and use‑case performance under power and thermal constraints.

Key Responsibilities:

• Drive performance optimization for Compute devices, and mentor a small team to deliver best‑in‑class system performance
• Boot optimizations to meet product demands of Compute devices, including boot‑time reduction, robustness, and debug.
• Product‑specific use‑case optimizations driven by real workloads, profiling, and end‑to‑end system analysis.
• Memory optimizations and performance tuning, including memory allocation behavior, pressure, fragmentation, and latency analysis.
• Ownership and delivery of overall product power and performance KPIs, including measurement, tuning, and regression prevention.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to technical reviews, design documentation, and architectural discussions, while remaining primarily hands‑on.
• Represent the company in upstream Linux and open‑source communities through technical contributions, discussions, and patch reviews.
• Enhancing and supporting userspace resource‑manager frameworks to enable effective power/performance trade‑offs.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including Systems Architecture, Hardware Design, Power, Thermal, and OS (Linux/Android) teams to resolve architectural bottlenecks.
• Collaborate and work with upstream community to resolve issues, regressions or new optimizations.
• Triage and debug complex performance regressions using profiling tools (ftrace, perf, etc).

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in Linux software development, with a strong focus on Arm architecture.
• Deep understanding of Linux kernel and operating‑system fundamentals, especially scheduling, memory management, and power management.
• Proven experience upstreaming patches and working with the Linux software community.
• Experience with virtualization (KVM) and container technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong debugging skills using tools such as ftrace, perf, kgdb, crash, kernel logs, and related tracing tools.
• Strong analytical skills to identify and resolve system‑level performance and power issues.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with sched‑ext based schedulers.
• Experience in AI/ML models.
• Contributions to, or maintainership of, Linux power, performance, or thermal software.

Minimum Qualifications:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electronics Engineering or related field and 5+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience.

OR

Master’s degree in Engineering in Computer Science, Electronics Engineering or related field and 4+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience.

OR

PhD in Engineering in Computer Science, Electronics Engineering or related field and 3+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience.

3+ years of work experience with programming languages such as C/C++, Rust, Python, etc.

3+ years of work experience in linux system performance analysis

3+ years of work experience in compute

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 4+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience.
• OR
• Master's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 3+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience.
• OR
• PhD in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 2+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience.
• 2+ years of work experience with Programming Language such as C, C++, Java, Python, etc.

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