Application Engineer

Job Title: Senior Linux Kernel Engineer

Experience: 5–10 Years

Location: Bangalore / Chennai

Domain: Enterprise Linux / Kernel Development

Job Summary

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Linux Kernel Engineer with deep expertise in kernel development, debugging, and performance optimization. The role involves working on enterprise-grade Linux distributions, kernel lifecycle management, security patching, and low-level hardware integration.

Key Responsibilities

1. Kernel Lifecycle & Maintenance

• Lead kernel upgrade strategies (e.g., LTS migrations such as 5.15 → 6.x) while ensuring stability and compatibility.
• Perform patch porting across kernel versions, resolving API and dependency conflicts.
• Track and mitigate security vulnerabilities by monitoring CVEs and upstream sources (e.g., LKML).
• Backport critical fixes to production kernels without impacting system stability.

2. Debugging & System Stability

• Act as an escalation point for kernel panics and system crashes.
• Perform post-mortem analysis using kdump, crash, and gdb.
• Debug early boot issues (UEFI, initramfs, kernel initialization).
• Conduct performance analysis using eBPF, ftrace, and perf to optimize system behavior.

3. Driver Development & Hardware Integration

• Design, develop, and maintain device drivers (network, storage, GPU, or character devices).
• Work closely with hardware through DMA, interrupts (MSI-X), and register-level programming.
• Maintain out-of-tree drivers using DKMS or similar frameworks.
• Ensure compatibility of drivers across kernel updates.

Required Technical Skills

• Programming: Strong expertise in C (mandatory) and C++
• Kernel Internals: Deep understanding of:
• Virtual File System (VFS)
• Memory Management (MMU, Paging)
• Process Scheduler
• Linux Networking Stack
• Debugging Tools:
• kdump, crash, gdb
• kprobes, trace-cmd, ftrace
• perf, valgrind
• Hardware debugging tools (JTAG, Serial Console)
• Build Systems:
• Kbuild, Makefiles
• Kernel packaging (RPM/Debian)
• Security:
• Experience with CVE patching and backporting
• Knowledge of SELinux/AppArmor
• Kernel hardening (FIPS, KSPP)

Preferred Skills

• Experience contributing to open-source kernel projects
• Familiarity with Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) workflows
• Exposure to enterprise Linux distributions (RHEL, Ubuntu, SUSE)
• Experience with performance tuning and system optimization at scale

1. Core Programming (C Language)

• Must have strong hands-on experience in C programming
• Comfortable with pointers, memory management, and low-level concepts

2. Kernel Internals Expertise

• Should have worked in at least one subsystem:
• VFS / File Systems
• Memory Management
• Scheduler / Networking

3. Debugging & Crash Analysis

• Experience handling kernel panics
• Hands-on with vmcore analysis tools

4. Security & Patching

• Understanding of CVE fixes and backporting

5. Driver Development

• Experience in writing or maintaining device drivers

6. Performance & Advanced Debugging

• Exposure to eBPF, ftrace, perf

7. Hardware-Level Understanding

• Knowledge of DMA, interrupts, hardware interaction

Soft Skills

• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities
• Excellent communication skills
• Ability to work independently and in collaborative environments
• Quick learner with adaptability to new technologies

We're seeking passionate, next-gen minded engineers who are excited about solving complex technical challenges and building innovative, first-of-its-kind products which make a tangible difference for our customers. As a Backend SDE-1, you will play a key role in driving strategic initiatives, collaborating with cross-functional teams across business, product, and operations to solve exciting problems. This role demands strong technical acumen, leadership capabilities, and a mindset focused on innovation and operational excellence.

We value individuals who think independently, challenge the status quo, and bring creativity and curiosity to the table—not those who simply follow instructions. If you're passionate about solving problems and making an impact, we'd love to hear from you.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic Planning: Work closely with senior leadership to develop and implement engineering strategies that support business objectives. Understand broader organization goals and constantly prioritise your own work.
• Technical Excellence: Understand the onground problems, explore and design various possible solutions to conclude and implement scalable, extensible and secure software systems. Implement and learn best practices in technical architecture, coding standards, and software testing to ensure product delivery with highest speed AND quality.
• Project and Program Management: Setting up aggressive as well as realistic timelines with all the stakeholders, ensure the successful delivery of engineering projects as per the defined timelines with best quality standards ensuring budget constraints are met. Use agile methodologies to manage the development process and resolve bottlenecks.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Collaborate with Product Managers, Design, Business, and Operations teams to define project requirements and deliverables. Ensure the smooth integration of engineering efforts across the organization.
• Risk Management: Anticipate and mitigate technical risks and roadblocks. Proactively identify areas of technical debt and drive initiatives to reduce it.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• 1+ years of experience in software engineering
• Excellent problem-solving skills, with the ability to diagnose and resolve complex technical challenges.
• Strong understanding of software design principles and patterns.
• Hands on with multiple programming languages and modern development frameworks.
• Understanding of relational and non-relational databases.
• Experience with Redis, ElasticSearch.
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and inspire teams and stakeholders at all levels.

Skills:- MySQL, Python, Django, AWS, NoSQL, Kafka, Redis, ElasticSearch

Requirements

• Extensive and expert programming experience in at least one general programming language (e. g.

Java, C, C++) & tech stack to write maintainable, scalable, unit-tested code.

• Experience with multi-threading and concurrency programming.

• Extensive experience in object oriented design skills, knowledge of design patterns, and a huge passion

and ability to design intuitive modules and class-level interfaces.

• Excellent coding skills - should be able to convert design into code fluently.

• Knowledge of Test Driven Development.

• Good understanding of databases (e. g. MySQL) and NoSQL (e. g. HBase, Elasticsearch, Aerospike etc).

• Strong desire to solve complex and interesting real world problems.

• Experience with full life cycle development in any programming language on a Linux platform.

• Go-getter attitude that reflects in energy and intent behind assigned tasks.

• Worked in a startup-like environment with high levels of ownership and commitment.

• BTech, MTech or Ph. D. in Computer Science or related technical discipline (or equivalent).

• Experience in building highly scalable business applications, which involve implementing large complex

business flows and dealing with huge amounts of data.

• 3+ years of experience in the art of writing code and solving problems on a large scale.

• Open communicator who shares thoughts and opinions frequently, listens intently, and takes

constructive feedback.

Responsibilities:

• Experience and working knowledge of Java 8, Hibernate, Spring Boot, Microservices and REST API is mandatory
• Expert understanding of the object-oriented design and programming concepts
• Strong problem solving skills, data structures and algorithms and multithreading
• Good understanding of AWS and cloud-native technologies
• Knowledge of AWS services - RDS, DynamoDB, Elastic Search, Kinesis. Experience of working with AWS SDK is preferred.
• Good understanding of CI/CD and Jenkins pipeline
• Experience of writing unit tests using Junit/Mockito
• Knowledge of Integration Testing framework like Cucumber is required.
• Proficient in Git commands and branching concepts

Software Engineer - II (Backend)

As a Software Engineer – II, you'll bring a good understanding of design and coding practices and apply these independently in development. In this role - you could expect to:

• Own the lifecycle of a feature from requirement analysis to deployment and post production processes
• Perform code reviews and support your team implement best practices
• Explore trade off's on module designs
• Continuously improve performance metrics of modules owned. Performs RCAs and deploys long term fixes.
• Implement initiatives that improve engineering efficiency and excellence
• Participate in the hiring and interview process for junior developers on your team

Must-Have:

• Core Java (Must be good in Core Java concepts, Java programming practices, Clean coding.)
• Spring Framework(Must have working experience in Spring Core)
• Any SQL framework(hands-on working experience in any of these: Hibernate/JPA/MyBatis/Spring Data/Others)
• Hands-on experience in REST API
• Hands-on experienceSQL Database(any of the databases: Oracle/MySQL/PostgreSQL/SQLServer)
• Must have working experience with basic GIT
• Maven or Gradle (Must have working experience in building Java projects using maven or Gradle.)
• Should be able to work independently under someone's guidance.

Good to have:

• Advanced Java(Threading, Performance optimization)
• Spring Boot
• Other Spring frameworks(Spring Security, Spring Batch, Others)
• Microservices - Any NoSQL database(MongoDB, Cassandra, others)
• Application designing concepts.

Technologies

Must have                         Core JAVA, J2EE, Multithreading, OOPS, and Multiprocessing

Great to have                   RabbitMQ, Netty, XML, JSON, Messagepack

Huge Advantage:             Good at mathematics, statistics, complex data structures, algorithms, and design patterns

Other skills

• Ability to understand most complex and challenging problems and solve them from users’ view point
• Ability to create and present software designs (as per the aligned solution) to the product owner
• Ability to build and create modules from scratch.
• Ability to write, understand and deal with large code base
• Experience in understanding and implementing design patterns
• Ability to provide technical leadership to a team of equally talented, efficient and motivated engineers

Roles and responsibilities

• Responsible for solving the most complex and seemingly impossible problems related to variety of dimensions of software engineering. Dealing with Big Data to Complex Data Structures, From Inter Process Communication to sub 100 MilliSec server responses, From Distributed Systems to 99.999 Availability.
• Responsible for providing technical leadership to a team of 3-4 Engineers
• Responsible to drive delivery of a project/module and report to Product Owner
• Responsible for functional/technical tracking of a project/module

Responsibility Split

• 80% Technology, 20% Team management
• With 80:20 split this is definitely a technology oriented role suitable for geeks.