Principal Kernel Engineer in Cambridge

We are seeking a Principal Kernel Engineer to join at Huawei R&D UK, Cambridge, driving 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 role 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 and defragmentation, transparent huge pages, page‑fault and TLB‑shootdown paths, 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, cpufreq/cpuidle governor interaction
• Optimize synchronization primitives and lock‑heavy paths: futex fast/slow paths, mutexes and rwsems, spinlocks/qspinlocks, RCU, seqlocks, per‑CPU data, memory ordering and barriers on ARM64
• Analyse and improve IPC and syscall paths: context‑switch cost, binder‑style IPC, shared memory, vDSO, interrupt/softirq handling
• Identify bottlenecks on 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
• Land production‑quality kernel patches from hypothesis through benchmarking to ship, with measured latency and energy impact
• Collaborate with CPU microarchitects on HW‑SW co‑design: exploit microarchitectural features in the kernel and shape future hardware through kernel‑driven requirements
• Contribute to AI‑assisted kernel optimization pipelines (automated analyze → patch → benchmark → validate loops)

This job description is only an outline of the tasks, responsibilities and outcomes required of the role. The jobholder will carry out any other duties as may be reasonably required by his/her line manager. The job description and personal specification may be reviewed on an ongoing basis in accordance with the changing needs of Huawei Research and Development UK Limited.

Person Specification

Required

• 10+ years of OS kernel development in C (Linux or comparable), with patches shipped to production systems at scale
• 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, the 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

Desired

• Mobile power engineering: DVFS governors, cpuidle, per‑workload energy attribution
• 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

What we offer

• 33 days annual leave entitlement per year (including UK public holidays)
• Group Personal Pension
• Life insurance
• Private medical insurance
• Medical expense claim scheme
• Employee Assistance Program
• Cycle to work scheme
• Company sports club and social events
• Additional time off for learning and development