Kernel Driver Architect for AI Accelerators

The Consensus; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

Relocation to San Jose

Housing subsidy

Wellness programs

Daily lunch in office

Unlimited compute budget

Job summary

Etched is seeking a highly skilled kernel-mode driver engineer to design, develop, and optimize drivers for ML accelerators in a fast-paced hardware-software co-design team. You will work on memory management, IOMMU configurations, SR-IOV and VFIO integration, and ensure security across host memory spaces.

You will collaborate with hardware and software teams to minimize latency, maximize throughput, build robust test plans, and contribute to production-grade driver stacks used in demanding AI

Qualifications

• Proficiency in C/C++.
• Strong understanding of kernel-mode driver development and debugging.
• Deep understanding of operating system internals (Linux preferred).
• Experience with hardware/software interfacing and device drivers.
• Experience with memory management and synchronization in kernel environments.
• Strong understanding of PCIe and other hardware interfaces.
• Experience with device virtualization technologies, including SR-IOV and VFIO.
• Strong understanding of kernel memory mapping, page table configuration, and IOMMU.
• Familiarity with hardware-software co-design principles.
• Proven ability to analyze complex technical problems and provide effective solutions.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Experience with version control systems (e.g., Git).
• Experience with debugging tools (e.g., gdb, kgdb).

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain kernel-mode drivers ensuring high reliability, informative debug, and optimal performance.
• Analyze and optimize driver performance for demanding AI workloads, focusing on minimizing latency and maximizing throughput.
• Collaborate closely with hardware engineers throughout the ASIC design process.
• Implement driver support for device virtualization technologies, including SR-IOV, VFIO, and para-virtualization.
• Implement efficient memory management strategies considering kernel memory mapping, page tables configuration, NUMA awareness for device data caching, and IOMMU configuration.
• Build kernel drivers fundamentally designed to support and maintain security across host processes, memory spaces, and device attestation.
• Diagnose and resolve complex driver-related issues, using common kernel debugging tools and techniques (ftrace, dmesg, etc.) to identify and fix bugs.
• Design and implement synchronization mechanisms to handle concurrent access to multiple accelerators.
• Develop and execute comprehensive test plans to validate driver functionality, stability, and performance in manufacturing and in general production environments.
• Collaborate with software and hardware teams to diagnose and resolve complex system-level issues.

Skills

C/C++

kernel development

Linux internals

PCIe

SR-IOV

VFIO

device virtualization

memory management

IOMMU

debugging tools

Git

Tools

GDB

KGDB

Git

Perf

VTune

Job description

Etched is seeking a highly skilled kernel-mode driver engineer to design, develop, and optimize drivers for ML accelerators in a fast-paced hardware-software co-design team. You will work on memory management, IOMMU configurations, SR-IOV and VFIO integration, and ensure security across host memory spaces.

You will collaborate with hardware and software teams to minimize latency, maximize throughput, build robust test plans, and contribute to production-grade driver stacks used in demanding AI