European Tech Recruit
Principal Kernel Engineer
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Principal Kernel Engineer Location: Cambridge, UK Type: Permanent
European Tech Recruit are collaborating with a leading telecommunications R&D company to find a talented Principal Kernel Engineer to join their team in Cambridge.
About the Role
You will be responsible for driving deep kernel performance and power optimisation for flagship mobile platforms, owning performance improvements across core kernel subsystems including:
- Memory management
- Scheduling
- IPC (Inter-Process Communication)
- Synchronisation
Duties will include analysing real-silicon behaviour at the microarchitectural level and implementing production-ready optimisations to enhance responsiveness, throughput, and battery life. This is a hands-on role suitable for an engineer proficient in:
- Allocator internals
- Scheduler hot paths
- Lock-contention tracing
Collaborating with CPU microarchitects, runtime engineers, and AI-driven optimisation tooling.
Responsibilities
Kernel Performance Domains
Optimise the following subsystems, ensuring measurable improvements in latency and energy efficiency:
Memory Management
- Buddy allocator
- Slab/SLUB management
- Page reclaim and LRU/MGLRU (Multi-Generational LRU)
- Memory compaction & defragmentation
- Transparent huge pages
- Page-fault & TLB-shootdown paths
- Copy-on-write behaviour
Scheduling
- Run-queue and load-balancing optimisations
- Energy-aware scheduling
- Wakeup latency reduction
- Task placement on heterogeneous topologies (e.g., big.LITTLE/DynamIQ)
- Interaction with cpufreq and cpuidle governors
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Synchronisation
- Futex fast/slow paths
- Serialization primitives (mutexes, rwsems)
- Spinlocks/Qspinlocks
- RCU (Read-Copy-Update)
- Seqlocks
- ARM64-specific memory ordering & barriers
IPC & Systems Calls
- Context-switch cost reduction
- Binder-style IPC
- Shared memory optimisation
- vDSO (Virtual Dynamic Shared Object) tweaks
- Interrupt/softirq handling
Bottleneck Analysis
- Profiling flagship mobile workloads using:
- PMU counters
- ftrace/perf-tools
- eBPF
- Lock statistics (lockdep, lockstat)
- Power benchmarking (mA/mAh attribution)
- Testingfocus: gaming, day-of-use, camera, and AI inference applications
Production Deliverables
- Land production-quality kernel patches from hypothesis → benchmarking → shipping
- Ensure changes bring measured improvements in latency and energy efficiency
Hardware-Software Co-Design
- Collaborate with microarchitects to optimise kernel behaviour within hardware constraints
- Help shape future silicon based on kernel-driven requirements
AI-Assisted Tooling
- Families with kernel optimisation pipelines that leverage machine learning tools
Requirements
To be successful in this role, you should have:
Must-Have Experience
10+ years specialising in OS kernel development (Linux or comparable systems) with shipped patches to high-scale production environments. In-depth expertise required in:
- Virtual/Physical memory management: Page tables, buddy/separated allocation, reclaim, compaction, TLB management
- Scheduler internals:
- CFS/EEVDF
- Load balancing
- Preemption
- Real-time scheduling
- Energy awareness
- Kernel synchronisation:
- Locking primitives (spinlocks, mutexes)
- RCU (per CPU; hazard pointers, read sides vs. quiescent-state detection)
- Lock-free techniques on ARM64 architecture
- ARMV8-A memory ordering and barrier semantics
- Kernel-low-level analysis:
- PMU counters (in assembly as well as software views)
- Ages-perf/ftrace
- eBPF instrumentation
- Lock contention and latency detection
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Desirable Traits
- Proficiency in mobile power engineering (DVFS governors, cpuidle, workload energy quantification)
- Significant upstream Linux kernel contributions (e.g., mm, sched, loops, related code)
- Familiarity with kernel subsets like HarmonyOS or Android Common Kernel
- Experience with ARMv8 microarchitectural behaviour and cycle-accurate modelling (e.g., gem5 simulator)
- Practical exposure with LLM/agentic systems tools applied to kernel rainpatch generation
How to Apply
Interested candidates are directed to:
- Apply via LinkedIn
- Email CV to nh@eu-recruit.com
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