Windows Kernel Engineer: Low-Level Systems & Security

Cylake, Inc; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Cylake, Inc is seeking a skilled Windows systems engineer to design and build the low-level endpoint infrastructure powering real-time telemetry and system instrumentation across Windows environments.

You will work across kernel-mode and user-mode, implement scalable data structures, and debug complex concurrency while reasoning about Windows internals beyond documented APIs alongside a world-class team.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience building low-level Windows systems software.
• Deep expertise in Windows kernel architecture and NT internals.
• Extensive experience developing Windows kernel drivers.
• Strong knowledge of process, thread, memory, and object management.
• Expert-level C/C++ programming skills.
• Experience debugging complex multithreaded systems.
• Ability to reason about undocumented operating system behavior through analysis and debugging.
• Nice-to-have: Rust, Windows minifilters, WFP/NDIS, ETW, Hypervisor tech.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop production-quality Windows kernel drivers using WDM/WDF.
• Build kernel instrumentation and telemetry pipelines for endpoint visibility.
• Develop high-performance process, thread, and image lifecycle tracking.
• Implement scalable kernel callback infrastructure (process/thread/image/registry/object).
• Design lock-efficient kernel data structures and synchronization strategies.
• Build reliable user/kernel communication mechanisms.
• Debug complex concurrency, synchronization, and memory issues.
• Work across kernel-mode and user-mode components to enable telemetry and security features.
• Reverse engineer OS components when documentation is unavailable.
• Debug boot-time, runtime, and kernel crash scenarios.

Skills

C/C++ programming

Windows kernel architecture

NT internals

Kernel drivers

Multithreaded debugging

WinDbg

Undocumented OS behavior

Rust (nice-to-have)

Minifilters (nice-to-have)

Tools

WinDbg

Kernel debugging tools

Job description

Cylake, Inc is seeking a skilled Windows systems engineer to design and build the low-level endpoint infrastructure powering real-time telemetry and system instrumentation across Windows environments.

You will work across kernel-mode and user-mode, implement scalable data structures, and debug complex concurrency while reasoning about Windows internals beyond documented APIs alongside a world-class team.