At a Glance
- Tasks: Drive kernel performance and power optimisation for flagship mobile platforms.
- Company: Join a global tech leader in ICT infrastructure and R&D.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, flexible working options, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Dynamic team environment with exciting projects and career advancement opportunities.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on cutting-edge mobile technology and collaborate with top engineers.
- Qualifications: 10+ years of OS kernel development experience and deep technical knowledge.
The predicted salary is between 80000 - 100000 £ per year.
A global Tech leader in ICT infrastructure and R&D Giant is hiring a Principal Kernel Engineer to join their specialized team in Cambridge. In this role, you will drive deep kernel performance and power optimization for flagship mobile platforms. You will own performance across core kernel subsystems — memory management, scheduling, IPC, and synchronization — analysing behaviour on real silicon down to the microarchitectural level and landing production-shippable optimizations that improve responsiveness, throughput, and battery life.
This is a hands-on position for an engineer who is at home in allocator internals, scheduler hot paths, and lock-contention traces, working alongside CPU microarchitects, runtime engineers, and AI-driven optimization tooling.
Key Responsibilities- Optimize Memory Management Internals: Buddy allocator, slab/SLUB, page reclaim and LRU/MGLRU, memory compaction/defragmentation, transparent huge pages, page-fault/TLB-shootdown paths, and copy-on-write behaviour.
- Drive Scheduler Performance: Run-queue and load-balancing behaviour, energy-aware scheduling, wakeup latency, task placement on heterogeneous (big.LITTLE/DynamIQ) topologies, and cpufreq/cpuidle governor interaction.
- Optimize Synchronization Primitives: Futex fast/slow paths, mutexes/rwsems, spinlocks/qspinlocks, RCU, seqlocks, per-CPU data, and memory ordering/barriers on ARM64.
- Analyse IPC & Syscall Paths: Context-switch cost, binder-style IPC, shared memory, vDSO, and interrupt/softirq handling.
- Identify Bottlenecks: Evaluate flagship mobile workloads (gaming, day-of-use, camera, AI inference) using PMU counters, ftrace/perf, eBPF, lockdep/lockstat, and power measurement with mA/mAh attribution.
- Deliver Production-Quality Patches: Bring patches from hypothesis through benchmarking to ship, ensuring measured latency and energy impact.
- HW-SW Co-Design: Collaborate with CPU microarchitects to exploit microarchitectural features in the kernel and shape future hardware through kernel-driven requirements.
- AI Pipelines: Contribute to AI-assisted kernel optimization pipelines.
- 10+ years of OS kernel development in C (Linux or comparable), with patches shipped to production systems at scale.
- Expert-level MM internals: Physical/virtual memory management, buddy and slab allocation, reclaim, compaction, page tables, and TLB management.
- Deep scheduler knowledge: CFS/EEVDF internals, load balancing, preemption, real-time classes, and energy-aware scheduling.
- Mastery of kernel synchronization: Locking primitives, RCU, lock-free techniques, the ARM64 memory model, and barrier semantics.
- Kernel performance analysis: PMU counters, ftrace/perf, eBPF, lock contention, and latency analysis.
- Strong ARM64 architecture grounding: Exception levels, cache hierarchy and maintenance, TLBs, and memory ordering.
- Mobile power engineering: DVFS governors, cpuidle, and per-workload energy attribution.
- Upstream Linux kernel contributions (mm, sched, locking, or related subsystems).
- Familiarity with mobile platforms: HarmonyOS or Android common kernel.
- CPU Microarchitecture: Exposure to cycle-accurate modelling (gem5).
- Modern Tooling: Experience with LLM/agentic tooling applied to systems software.
Principal Kernel Engineer in Cambridge employer: European Tech Recruit
Join a global tech leader in ICT infrastructure and R&D, where as a Principal Kernel Engineer in Cambridge, you will be part of a dynamic team dedicated to pushing the boundaries of mobile platform performance. Enjoy a collaborative work culture that fosters innovation and offers ample opportunities for professional growth, while benefiting from competitive compensation and a commitment to work-life balance in a vibrant city known for its tech ecosystem.
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We think this is how you could land Principal Kernel Engineer in Cambridge
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We think you need these skills to ace Principal Kernel Engineer in Cambridge
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