Senior Linux Systems Performance Engineer – Onboard Real-Time

Pittsburgh Robotics Network; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); Hybrid; USD 149,000 - 198,500; Full time

Job summary

Motional is seeking a Linux Systems Performance Engineer to improve the performance, reliability, and observability of our onboard compute platform. This hybrid role is based in Pittsburgh, requiring in-office days for hands-on work and collaboration with autonomy and platform teams.

You will design low-overhead observability infrastructure, build metrics and tracing tools, investigate resource contention and latency issues, and translate findings into durable improvements across CPU, memory,

Qualifications

• Experience debugging and optimizing Linux system performance.
• Understanding OS concepts: scheduling, memory, filesystems, networking.
• Experience diagnosing resource contention, latency, and throughput in production systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build low-overhead observability infrastructure for resource usage, latency, scheduling behavior, and system health.
• Develop metrics, tracing, profiling, and analysis tools that identify performance contention and explain system behavior.
• Improve real-time and post-event root cause analysis across CPU, memory, storage, networking, and other shared resources.
• Partner with autonomy and platform teams to investigate crashes, latency spikes, missed deadlines, resource exhaustion, and performance regressions.
• Analyze application, operating system, kernel, and hardware interactions on embedded Linux compute platforms.
• Translate investigations into durable improvements, including tooling, alerts, dashboards, performance requirements, and architectural changes.
• Define performance benchmarks and regression tests for onboard systems.
• Evaluate the performance impact of new software, hardware, and system configurations.
• Communicate findings clearly and provide actionable recommendations to cross-functional engineering teams.
• Contribute to technical roadmaps for onboard observability and system performance.

Skills

Linux performance debugging

OS concepts

Resource contention diagnosis

Perf/tracing tools

C/C++

Python automation

Telemetry analysis

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication skills

Tools

perf

ftrace

eBPF/BPF

BCC

bpftrace

flame graphs

Job description

Motional is seeking a Linux Systems Performance Engineer to improve the performance, reliability, and observability of our onboard compute platform. This hybrid role is based in Pittsburgh, requiring in-office days for hands-on work and collaboration with autonomy and platform teams.

You will design low-overhead observability infrastructure, build metrics and tracing tools, investigate resource contention and latency issues, and translate findings into durable improvements across CPU, memory,