Staff Engineer - Linux & Kernel

Hungry, Humble, Honest, with Heart.

The Opportunity

Nutanix AHV builds on top of the open-source x86-KVM stack, with an emphasis on performance, scale, and reliability. The hyperconverged nature of our stack provides the phenomenal potential for optimizations cutting across various parts of our stack -- right from the kernel and ranging up to, but not limited by, the management layer.

We are looking for original thinkers who won't hesitate to demand conventional thought in arriving at out-of-the-box solutions.

We aim to work as closely aligned with the open-source community as possible. Our engineers are highly encouraged to participate in open-source community development. Any work you do will be preserved as open-source commit(s) for posterity!

A day in the life of an AHV hypervisor engineer:

• Problems you’ll solve:
  • We’ve always believed in demanding the status quo and disrupting ourselves to provide the best in-class customer experience. A case in point: Nutanix is well known for providing a zero-touch upgrade experience for our customers. Within the hypervisor team, we are focussing on various ways to make this faster and more reliable -- by pushing the limits of VM live migrations towards speed and predictability, or rethinking why a hypervisor upgrade should need a reboot at all.

About the Team

At Nutanix, you will have the opportunity to be part of the Hypervisor team, a dynamic group that is spread out geographically. Despite being in different locations, the team collaborates effectively and maintains a strong sense of camaraderie. Working with the Hypervisor team means being surrounded by talented people who are supportive, making it a great team to work with. This setup also provides exciting exposure to diverse perspectives and opportunities for personal and professional growth.

You will report to a Senior Manager who is committed to supporting your development and ensuring your success within the organization.This role operates in a hybrid capacity, blending the benefits of remote work with the advantages of in-person collaboration. In locations where our workplace policy applies (i.e. San Jose, Durham, Mexico City, Bangalore, Pune, Hoofddorp, Belgrade, Barcelona, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo), employees are expected to work onsite a minimum of 3 days per week to foster collaboration, team alignment, and access to in-office resources. Workplace type may vary based on location and team requirements. Please speak with your recruiter for details. Additional team-specific guidance and norms will be provided by your manager. As for travel requirements, there are none, allowing you to focus on your projects without the need for frequent travel.

Your Role

You’ll be working with a team of extremely talented engineers across a spectrum of geographies and experience. The most successful candidate for this role will be someone who can:

• Constantly look for ways to improve the product, learning from customer questions and not limited to existing technologies.
• Devise solutions and back them up with solid research and numbers to prove their efficacy.
• Have the ability to convey ideas to a geographically diverse audience using excellent communication/writing skills.
• Participate in design discussions, often outside one’s known comfort zone -- learning on the go.
• Proactively mentor junior members of the team, finding ways to fuel their intelligent curiosity and leverage their unique strengths.
• Not hesitate to help out with occasional customer escalations: Nutanix believes in putting customers first. While we have a huge, dedicated team to assist customers with any issues, there might be situations where engineering help might be sought to bail out a rare, unfortunate outage.
• Take pride in working with open-source communities to fold product improvements back into community projects.

What You Will Bring

• The must-haves:
  • Rock-solid OS/systems fundamentals drive design and implementation.
  • Low-level coding and debugging experience with at least one hardware architecture, preferably x86.
  • The ability to write and maintain enterprise-quality code.
  • Deep reasoning and detailed skills, which provide top-down thinking to break down abstract concepts into actionable pieces.
  • Proven feature delivery experience: should have 8+ years of hands-on experience of what it means to ship enterprise-quality code to customers.
• The good-to-haves:
  • Knowledge of x86 virtualization and the KVM stack.
  • Code contributions to the Linux kernel/virtualization stack is an added plus.

Desired qualification & experience:

• Bachelor's/Master's degree in computer science or equivalent.
• 8+ years of experience building enterprise-grade software, preferably some with guide experience.

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