Operating System Kernel Engineer

Do you love operating systems kernel implementation, digging into the gritty interface where software meets machine? We are seeking a software engineer to work on our illumos-based host operating system, Helios. Helios sits at the center of the Oxide rack, interfacing directly with a wide range of hardware, embedded software, and third-party firmware to support the Oxide control plane, hypervisor, and its virtual machine instances. The host OS is holistically designed to begin execution with the processor’s first instruction; it uniquely subsumes and replaces functionality that UEFI and ACPI firmware provide in other architectures.

As an engineer working on operating systems kernel development, you will:

• Work with a helpful and experienced team to design, build, and bring up host system software on current and future Oxide computers

• Read and write code in C (for the operating system writ large), in Rust (for for some in-kernel components and for higher-level services), and/or microprocessor assembly. All the code you write will be open source.

• Grow and apply your understanding of microprocessors, through deep familiarity with available documentation, interacting directly with real hardware, and producing your own documents where the vendor’s fall short

• Contribute to the security and resiliency of the system by designing for failure from the ground up

• Participate in a rigorous code review process and help your colleagues maintain our software in a production-ready state at all times

• Apply a customer-centric view to the development of new end-to-end features and functions and help realize them across the stack

• Contribute to the design of new Oxide hardware and software components elsewhere in the stack

You will thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience in operating systems kernel development

• Seek the versatility of working from core OS architecture to hardware interface to networking to device development.

• Enjoy the freedom of blazing your own architectural trails and solving problems from first principles

• Are up to the challenge of interfacing with hardware that has missing or inaccurate documentation

• Appreciate the hard-won thrill of debugging a knotty problem to root cause

• Believe in fully documenting your ideas for both current colleagues and your own future self

• Enjoy reading excellent documentation produced by others

• Make the tools you wish you had

• Communicate effectively with engineers across a range of disciplines to exchange knowledge and expertise

Before applying for this role, you should:

• Experiment with an illumos-derived operating system, familiarizing yourself with tools like DTrace and MDB to explore the system

• Prowl around the code in Helios

• Browse our public Requests for Discussion to get a flavor for how we work

• Listen to Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz to familiarize yourself with the Oxide hiring process.

• Listen to some of our episodes of Oxide and Friends. A few recommendations:

• Helios on the genesis of our illumos derivative as discussed in RFD 26

• Holistic Boot on our approach to BIOS-free booting

• Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino) on the work we’re doing for AMD’s Turin microprocessor

• Holistic Engineering on our integrated hardware/software approach

• Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug on tracking down a long-standing data corruption bug in ZFS

Life at Oxide We are very explicit about our values, and they can be seen in daily life at Oxide, for example:

• Our rigor means we enjoy and take pride in the craft of engineering.

• Our urgency means that we are not above the judicious short-cut.

• Our versatility is reflected in our greatest strength: the breadth of our team.

• Our transparency can be seen in our consensus-driven RFD process.

• Our responsibility means that we both lead and follow: we have our own domains, but we also help others on their parts.

• Our curiosity shows in our insatiable desire to learn – and our empathy in our love of teaching others.

• Our humor is a big part of our daily lives: we are inveterate wise-crackers whose video meetings spill into simultaneous text chat.

Apply here