Senior Linux Kernel Engineer for Embedded Flight Systems

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

Job summary

Zipline, the world’s leading autonomous logistics company, seeks an experienced Linux kernel engineer for embedded flight computers in San Francisco. You’ll own kernel drivers, hardware bring-up, and platform validation, helping the system scale to millions of deliveries daily.

You’ll mentor peers, define reliability tooling, and collaborate with hardware, firmware, and flight software teams to ship robust kernel software at pace.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional Linux kernel work, with ownership of a driver or hardware bring-up.
• Solid C knowledge and deep kernel internals: scheduling, interrupts, memory management, DMA, MMIO.
• Proven ability to debug on real hardware and read datasheets to find root causes.
• Fluency with kernel debugging tools (ftrace, perf, crash analysis) and validating fixes with data.

Responsibilities

• Diagnose crashes, hangs, races, and driver failures across a deployed fleet and translate findings into tests.
• Own kernel drivers and platform bring-up end to end.
• Design for failure and verify behavior on real hardware with device trees and firmware interfaces.
• Mentor engineers and raise code quality, debugging practices, and testing standards.

Skills

Linux kernel

C programming

Kernel debugging

Driver development

Team mentoring

Upstream work

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/CE or equivalent

Tools

ARM64

Device tree

eBPF/XDP

Job description

Zipline, the world’s leading autonomous logistics company, seeks an experienced Linux kernel engineer for embedded flight computers in San Francisco. You’ll own kernel drivers, hardware bring-up, and platform validation, helping the system scale to millions of deliveries daily.

You’ll mentor peers, define reliability tooling, and collaborate with hardware, firmware, and flight software teams to ship robust kernel software at pace.