Principal Kernel Engineer
On-site · Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Job Summary
Principal Kernel Engineer to drive deep kernel performance and power optimization for flagship mobile platforms at Huawei R&D UK, Cambridge. Own performance across core kernel subsystems—memory management, scheduling, IPC, and synchronization—analyzing behaviour on real silicon and landing production-shippable optimizations that improve responsiveness, throughput, and battery life. Hands-on work in allocator internals, scheduler hot paths, and lock-contention traces, collaborating with CPU microarchitects, runtime engineers, and AI-assisted optimization tooling. Responsibilities include optimizing memory management internals (buddy/slab, page reclaim, defragmentation, transparent huge pages, TLB-shootdown), driving scheduler performance, optimizing synchronization primitives, improving IPC and syscall paths, identifying bottlenecks on flagship mobile workloads, and delivering production-quality kernel patches from hypothesis through benchmarking to ship. Desired: mobility power engineering (DVFS governors, cpuidle), upstream kernel contributions, HarmonyOS/Android kernel familiarity, exposure to CPU microarchitecture modelling, and experience with LLM/agentic tooling for systems software.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of OS kernel development in C (Linux or comparable) with patches shipped to production systems
- Expert-level understanding of MM internals: physical/virtual memory management, buddy and slab allocation, reclaim, compaction, page tables, TLB management
- Deep scheduler knowledge: CFS/EEVDF internals, load balancing, preemption, real-time classes, energy-aware scheduling
- Mastery of kernel synchronization: locking primitives, RCU, lock-free techniques, ARM64 memory model and barrier semantics
- Proven kernel performance-analysis skills: PMU counters, ftrace/perf, eBPF, lock contention and latency analysis
- Strong ARM64 architecture grounding: exception levels, cache hierarchy and maintenance, TLBs, memory ordering
- Upstream Linux kernel contributions (mm, sched, locking, or related subsystems)
- Familiarity with HarmonyOS or Android common kernel
- Exposure to CPU microarchitecture and cycle-accurate modelling (gem5)
- Experience with LLM/agentic tooling applied to systems software
Apply with one swipe on Sorce. We auto-fill applications and apply on your behalf — no cover letters, no 40-minute forms.
Hiring someone like this?
Get your role in front of qualified candidates on Sorce.