{"id":3463342,"url":"https://alion.io/job/zipline-seniorstaff-linux-kernel-engineer-avionics-sw","title":"Senior/Staff Linux Kernel Engineer - Avionics SW","company":{"id":15878,"name":"Zipline","domain":"zipline.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/zipline","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":15,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.467,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":68,"computed_at":"2026-11-03T05:54:40Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"staff","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["South San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":160000,"max":250000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":250000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"eBPF","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-02T20:49:45Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-15","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T00:19:46Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":32,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":32},"description":"About Zipline\nZipline is the world’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service. We are on a mission to serve all humans equally by ensuring access to food, medicine and essential goods anytime, anywhere. We design, build, and operate the world’s largest autonomous logistics system, delivering critical supplies quickly and reliably. Today, Zipline operates on four continents, makes a delivery somewhere in the world every 30 seconds, and has completed millions of deliveries to date, including blood, vaccines, medical supplies, food, and retail products. \nOur customers include the world’s largest and most prominent healthcare systems, governments, retailers, restaurants and global businesses who rely on us to save lives, reduce emissions, increase economic opportunity, and provide delivery from point A to point B as fast as possible. The drone is only 15% of what we’ve built to enable seamless, reliable, global operations.\nOur system strengthens supply chains, reduces congestion, and gives people time back. With more than 140 million commercial autonomous miles safely flown, Zipline is redefining access to healthcare, consumer products, and food across the globe.\nWe operate at a global scale and are looking for practical problem solvers who thrive on real-world challenges and rapid growth. Our team is motivated by building systems that have a direct, meaningful impact on people’s lives and by scaling the future of logistics. We are seeking people who sculpt from first principles, enjoy facing adversity, and can do the impossible at record breaking speeds.\nAbout You and The Role \nWe're looking for an experienced Linux kernel engineer to own and solve hard problems across hardware, firmware, kernel, and userspace on our embedded flight computers. You will set the technical direction for the kernel and platform work, as well as bring up new hardware, develop and maintain kernel drivers, and debug system-level issues, and shape how we build and validate kernel software as the platform scales to millions of deliveries every single day.\nAs a Senior or Staff Linux kernel engineer at Zipline, you will be responsible for stability and performance of the Linux kernel, which is the foundation of our flight computers. The kernel operates as a safety-critical software layer that will enable our aircraft to safely make millions of deliveries a day. You'll own the kernel drivers, hardware bring-up, and system-level debugging that the rest of the flight software stack depends on.\nYou will work closely with hardware, firmware, platform, networking, and flight software teams, from the first boot of a new board to diagnosing rare failures across a deployed fleet. You'll help define what \"ready to ship\" means and build the validation that backs it up.\nYou will also help build reusable kernel tooling, diagnostics, and automated tests that level up our systems' observability and reliability. At the Staff level, you will set the technical direction for kernel and platform work, not just execute it.\nWhat You'll Do\nDiagnose crashes, hangs, races, driver failures, and performance or timing problems across a deployed fleet using crash dumps, kernel traces, logs, and telemetry, and turn rare field failures into reproducible tests.\nDrive ambiguous, cross-system issues from investigation to validated resolution, then invest in tooling, testing, and architecture so they don't come back.\nDevelop, debug, and maintain Linux kernel drivers and related subsystems, and own them end to end.\nDesign for failure: define how the kernel and drivers detect, contain, and recover from faults (watchdogs, error handling paths, graceful degradation), and verify that behavior on real hardware.\nBring up new hardware, including device tree configuration, firmware interfaces, and board-support software.\nBuild diagnostics, benchmarks, and automated tests that catch regressions before they ship.\nMeasure and improve latency, throughput, CPU and memory use, and networking performance.\nServe as a technical reviewer for kernel and driver changes, and maintain our patch stack across kernel upgrades.\nWrite and review design docs, and drive cross-team technical decisions to consensus with hardware, firmware, platform, networking, and flight software teams.\nMentor engineers and raise the team's bar for code quality, debugging practice, and testing.\nContribute patches upstream and track upstream regressions that affect us.\nWhat You'll Bring\n7+ years of professional Linux kernel work, including ownership of at least one driver, subsystem, or hardware bring-up from start to finish.\nStrong C and deep familiarity with kernel internals: scheduling, interrupts, concurrency, memory management, DMA, MMIO, and the Linux device model.\nA record of debugging on real hardware and reading datasheets or interface specs to find root causes.\nFluency with kernel debugging and measurement tools such as ftrace, perf, dynamic debug, and crash analysis, and the habit of validating fixes with data.\nComfort with the upstream patch workflow.\nExperience writing design docs, leading technical efforts across teams, and mentoring other engineers.\nClear written and verbal communication, including explaining a subtle kernel problem to people who don't work in the kernel.\nBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.\nExperience in one or more of these areas is a plus:\nPCIe, Ethernet/NIC drivers, DMA, IOMMU, MSI/MSI-X, or Linux networking\nEmbedded Linux, ARM64, device tree, or board bring-up\nReal-time systems, PREEMPT_RT, or latency analysis\neBPF, XDP, or high-performance networking\nKernel CI, stress testing, or performance regression testing\nUpstream kernel contributions, or maintaining a product kernel\nHardware debugging tools, firmware, bootloaders, or test automation scripting\nWhat Else You Need To Know \nThe starting cash ranges for this role is $160,000 - $250,000. Please note that this is a target, starting cash range for a candidate who meets the minimum qualifications for this role. The final cash pay for this role will depend on a variety of factors, including a specific candidate's experience, qualifications, skills, working location, and projected impact. The total compensation package for this role may also include: equity compensation; discretionary annual or performance bonuses; sales incentives; benefits such as medical, dental and vision insurance; paid time off; and more. This position may be hired at one of three levels based on the candidate’s experience, skills, and demonstrated scope:\nSoftware Engineer II: $160,000 - $190,000\nSenior Software Engineer: $190,000 - $220,000\nStaff Software Engineer: $220,000 - $250,000\nZipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws or our own sensibilities.\nWe value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!\nVoluntary Self-Identification\nFor government reporting purposes, we ask candidates to respond to the below self-identification survey. Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.\nAs set forth in Zipline ’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7863,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Vision insurance"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Drones & UAVs","Delivery","Logistics"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-29T14:36:18Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 63 · green card filings: 13","filings_12m":63,"filings_prev_12m":47,"green_card_filings_12m":13,"median_offered_wage_usd":170658,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":17}],"liveness":{"score":81,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":31,"expected_fill_days":68,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:mid","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-03T05:54:40Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":250000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/zipline-seniorstaff-linux-kernel-engineer-avionics-sw","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/zipline-seniorstaff-linux-kernel-engineer-avionics-sw.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-04T01:37:20Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2467,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-05T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":15878},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=15878"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fzipline-seniorstaff-linux-kernel-engineer-avionics-sw"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fzipline-seniorstaff-linux-kernel-engineer-avionics-sw"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fzipline-seniorstaff-linux-kernel-engineer-avionics-sw"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/zipline-seniorstaff-linux-kernel-engineer-avionics-sw\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fzipline-seniorstaff-linux-kernel-engineer-avionics-sw"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3463342}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"zipline.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3463342},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. 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