Senior Embedded Systems Engineer: Kernel & Drivers

Dimensional; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Dimensional is seeking an experienced embedded systems engineer to own kernel-level drivers and the DimOS hardware interface. You’ll consolidate kernel, BSPs, and vendor firmware across Jetson-class compute modules, ensuring timing, buses, and drivers are robust and testable.

You will work across CAN, UART, SPI/I2C, Ethernet, USB and real‑time Linux, patching kernels, building board support packages, and collaborating with hardware and software teams to ship reliable robotic systems.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of embedded systems design and development in production environments.
• Written kernel-level device drivers for actuators, motor controllers, or real-time peripherals.
• Real-time reasoning: latency budgets, scheduling, and graceful degradation.
• Depth across CAN, UART, SPI/I2C, Ethernet, USB drivers or debugging.
• Custom kernel experience: configuring, patching, and building Linux kernels for embedded targets.
• Built BSPs—device trees, bootloaders, Yocto or Buildroot pipelines.
• Experience with sensor vendor firmware integration and debugging.
• Strong written English and asynchronous collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Design, write, and maintain kernel-level drivers for actuators, motor controllers, and sensors across our robot platforms.
• Build and own board support packages for the compute platforms we ship on, including device trees, bootloaders, kernel configs, and power management.
• Integrate and wrangle sensor vendor firmware, evaluate and fix bugs, and expose clean interfaces to the rest of the stack.
• Own bus-level communication timing, synchronization, and failure handling across CAN/CAN-FD, EtherCAT, UART/RS-485, SPI, I2C, Ethernet, USB.
• Maintain custom kernel builds with real-time requirements (PREEMPT_RT).
• Make firmware testable: HIL rigs, bus captures, mocks for distributed testing.
• Produce production PRs into the public DimOS repository.

Skills

Embedded systems

Kernel drivers

Real-time

CAN/UART/SPI/I2C/Ethernet/USB

Linux kernel

Yocto/Buildroot

Sensor firmware

English communication

Job description

Dimensional is seeking an experienced embedded systems engineer to own kernel-level drivers and the DimOS hardware interface. You’ll consolidate kernel, BSPs, and vendor firmware across Jetson-class compute modules, ensuring timing, buses, and drivers are robust and testable.

You will work across CAN, UART, SPI/I2C, Ethernet, USB and real‑time Linux, patching kernels, building board support packages, and collaborating with hardware and software teams to ship reliable robotic systems.