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Salary: USD 170,000 - 230,000 / annual
Zipline is the world's largest autonomous drone delivery service, operating on four continents and completing millions of deliveries of blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. The company has flown over 140 million commercial autonomous miles and makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds.
You will own and solve hard problems across hardware, firmware, kernel, and userspace on Zipline's embedded flight computers. As a Senior or Staff Linux kernel engineer, you are responsible for the stability and performance of the Linux kernel, which is the safety-critical foundation of the flight computers enabling millions of daily deliveries.
Key responsibilities include:
- Diagnose crashes, hangs, races, driver failures, and performance issues across the deployed fleet using crash dumps, kernel traces, logs, and telemetry; turn rare field failures into reproducible tests
- Drive ambiguous cross-system issues from investigation to validated resolution, then invest in tooling, testing, and architecture to prevent recurrence
- Develop, debug, and maintain Linux kernel drivers and related subsystems end-to-end
- Design for failure: define how the kernel and drivers detect, contain, and recover from faults (watchdogs, error handling, graceful degradation) and verify behavior on real hardware
- Bring up new hardware, including device tree configuration, firmware interfaces, and board-support software
- Build diagnostics, benchmarks, and automated tests that catch regressions before shipping
- Measure and improve latency, throughput, CPU/memory use, and networking performance
- Serve as technical reviewer for kernel and driver changes; maintain patch stack across kernel upgrades
- Write and review design docs; drive cross-team technical decisions with hardware, firmware, platform, networking, and flight software teams
- Mentor engineers and raise the team's bar for code quality, debugging practice, and testing
- Contribute patches upstream and track upstream regressions
At the Staff level, you will set the technical direction for kernel and platform work, not just execute it. You will work closely with hardware, firmware, platform, networking, and flight software teams from first boot of a new board to diagnosing rare failures across the deployed fleet.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years of professional Linux kernel work, including ownership of at least one driver, subsystem, or hardware bring-up from start to finish
- Strong C and deep familiarity with kernel internals: scheduling, interrupts, concurrency, memory management, DMA, MMIO, and the Linux device model
- Record of debugging on real hardware and reading datasheets/interface specs to find root causes
- Fluency with kernel debugging and measurement tools (ftrace, perf, dynamic debug, crash analysis) and habit of validating fixes with data
- Comfort with upstream patch workflow
- Experience writing design docs, leading technical efforts across teams, and mentoring other engineers
- Clear written and verbal communication, including explaining subtle kernel problems to non-kernel engineers
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience
PLUS (preferred):
- PCIe, Ethernet/NIC drivers, DMA, IOMMU, MSI/MSI-X, or Linux networking
- Embedded Linux, ARM64, device tree, or board bring-up
- Real-time systems, PREEMPT_RT, or latency analysis
- eBPF, XDP, or high-performance networking
- Kernel CI, stress testing, or performance regression testing
- Upstream kernel contributions or maintaining a product kernel
- Hardware debugging tools, firmware, bootloaders, or test automation scripting
