Senior Systems Engineer, CKS Performance
$182,000–$242,000 year
On-siteLivingston, New Jersey, United States
EXPIREDLivingston, New Jersey, United StatesOn-siteFull Time$182,000–$242,000 yearSenior LevelTECHLarge
Full TimeSenior LevelLargeTECH
Job Summary
Debug kernel crashes, panics, and hangs using tools like crash, gdb, and kdump to identify root causes in memory management, scheduling, and namespaces. Trace complex, ambiguous failures in Kubernetes pods and cgroups back to the Linux kernel, distinguishing between orchestration bugs and kernel-level issues. Develop diagnostics for kernel observability and upstream patches to the mainline kernel, container runtimes, or Kubernetes when fixes apply. Partner with hardware and platform teams to ensure readiness for production workloads during incident response.
Required Qualifications
- 5+ years of professional experience in Linux kernel engineering, systems-level development, or a closely adjacent discipline
- Deep understanding of kernel internals — memory management, process/thread scheduling, cgroups, namespaces, and the networking or storage stack
- Hands-on experience with cgroups (v1 and/or v2) and namespaces, and how they underpin container isolation and resource limits
- Experience debugging kernel crashes, panics, hangs, and dumps using tools like crash, gdb, or kdump
- Strong C programming skills, with the ability to write maintainable, upstream-quality code
- Working knowledge of the container and Kubernetes stack — containerd, runc, the kubelet, and the CRI — and how kernel behavior shows up at that layer
- Skilled at cross-domain debugging: identifying whether a root cause lies in the kernel, the container runtime, or the orchestration layer above it
- Experience upstreaming patches to the Linux kernel, containerd, runc, or Kubernetes
- Familiarity with eBPF for kernel-level tracing, observability, or enforcement
- Experience with kernel networking (TCP/IP, RDMA/RoCE) or storage subsystems at scale
- Experience debugging GPU/DPU driver or hardware-enablement issues at the kernel level
- Background in HPC or large-scale distributed systems
- Contributions to the Linux kernel, containerd, runc, or Kubernetes projects
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