Senior/Staff Embedded Linux Software Engineer

Embedded Linux Software Engineer Confidential client. Search led by VoltForce.

Location: San Leandro, CA (on-site)

Job Type: Full-time

About The Company VoltForce is working with an early-stage materials-inspection company on the search for an Embedded Linux Software Engineer. Our client helps manufacturers make better, safer, and more reliable micro- and nano-scale materials, the building blocks of critical sectors like energy storage, semiconductors, aerospace, and power systems. As demand surges and production grows more complex and faster, small undetected variations during manufacturing lead to waste, lower performance, higher cost, and safety risk, leaving manufacturers with little visibility into the quality of what they produce.

The company's platform changes that. It non-destructively probes materials during production, pairing a novel sensing approach with physics-informed machine learning to capture real-time signals that conventional measurement techniques cannot access. Those signals give manufacturers rare visibility into how materials behave as they are made.

The company turns that hidden data into actionable intelligence, helping manufacturers reduce variability and increase yield and performance. The platform can run as a standalone tool or integrate directly into production lines, and it is already in early deployment with leading global manufacturers.

Role Overview Our client is seeking an Embedded Linux Software Engineer to join a small, high-impact firmware team building the embedded software stack for a commercial bench-top scientific instrument. The platform is an AMD/Xilinx FPGA SoC (Zynq / UltraScale+) running PetaLinux, with a mix of userspace applications, device drivers, and real-time control interfacing with custom programmable logic.

You will work alongside an embedded systems architect who owns the Linux application layer, peripheral subsystems, protocol design, and hardware integration. Your core mandate is threefold: share the Linux application workload, own test automation infrastructure, and establish CI/build reliability. You will write production code and the tooling that proves it works.

This is a small, documentation-driven team, and you will be expected to write clear design docs and track progress in Jira/Confluence. The role combines hands-on lab work with prototype hardware and desk-based software development, following a sequenced release cadence (HDL → OS/drivers → embedded applications → system integration).

What You'll Do

• Develop embedded Linux application software in C (userspace, POSIX)
• Develop userspace and kernel-space drivers for internal and external devices (sensors, actuators, instruments)
• Implement and extend application-level command/control/data protocols over TCP/IP
• Implement communication drivers for industrial instruments (mass flow controllers, vacuum gauges, motor controllers) over serial and CAN interfaces
• Design, build, and maintain hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) automated test systems
• Develop host-side test tooling (Python GUIs, emulators, scripted instrument drivers)
• Establish and maintain CI/CD pipelines and reproducible build infrastructure
• Participate in hardware bring-up, board-level validation, and lab bench debugging
• Contribute to architecture decisions, documentation, and design reviews

What We're Looking For

• B.S., M.S., or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related field, with 10+ years of relevant industry experience
• C for embedded Linux userspace, including threading, IPC, and POSIX APIs
• Python for test automation (pytest or equivalent framework) and scripted instrumentation
• TCP/IP socket programming on Linux (non-blocking I/O, connection lifecycle, streaming)
• UDP for discovery and lightweight telemetry
• Bus and serial protocols: UART, SPI, I2C, and CAN
• RS-232 and RS-485, including byte-level protocol implementation (framing, CRC, state machines, multi-device arbitration)
• Hardware bring-up and board-level debugging using oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and protocol analyzers
• Producer-consumer and ring buffer patterns for real-time data flow
• Hardware-in-the-loop test development and execution

Nice to Have

• Linux DMA programming (scatter-gather, buffer pool management, AXI-DMA)
• CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Docker-based build environments)
• Yocto or PetaLinux BSP experience
• Unit test frameworks for C (gtest, cmocka, Unity)
• Familiarity with FPGA register interfaces (UIO, devmem, register maps)
• Performance profiling and network analysis (Wireshark, throughput characterization)
• Python GUI development for test/operator tooling (Tkinter, PyQt)
• Familiarity with scientific or process-control instrumentation