Do you love operating systems kernel implementation, digging into the gritty interface where software meets machine? We are seeking a software engineer to work on our illumos-based host operating system, Helios. Helios sits at the center of the Oxide rack, interfacing directly with a wide range of hardware, embedded software, and third-party firmware to support the Oxide control plane, hypervisor, and its virtual machine instances. The host OS is holistically designed to begin execution with the processor’s first instruction; it uniquely subsumes and replaces functionality that UEFI and ACPI firmware provide in other architectures.
As an engineer working on operating systems kernel development, you will:
Work with a helpful and experienced team to design, build, and bring up host system software on current and future Oxide computers
Read and write code in C (for the operating system writ large), in Rust (for for some in-kernel components and for higher-level services), and/or microprocessor assembly. All the code you write will be open source.
Grow and apply your understanding of microprocessors, through deep familiarity with available documentation, interacting directly with real hardware, and producing your own documents where the vendor’s fall short
Contribute to the security and resiliency of the system by designing for failure from the ground up
Participate in a rigorous code review process and help your colleagues maintain our software in a production-ready state at all times
Apply a customer-centric view to the development of new end-to-end features and functions and help realize them across the stack
Contribute to the design of new Oxide hardware and software components elsewhere in the stack
You will thrive in this role if you:
Have experience in operating systems kernel development
Seek the versatility of working from core OS architecture to hardware interface to networking to device development.
Enjoy the freedom of blazing your own architectural trails and solving problems from first principles
Are up to the challenge of interfacing with hardware that has missing or inaccurate documentation
Appreciate the hard-won thrill of debugging a knotty problem to root cause
Believe in fully documenting your ideas for both current colleagues and your own future self
Enjoy reading excellent documentation produced by others
Make the tools you wish you had
Communicate effectively with engineers across a range of disciplines to exchange knowledge and expertise
Before applying for this role, you should:
Experiment with an illumos-derived operating system, familiarizing yourself with tools like DTrace and MDB to explore the system
Prowl around the code in Helios
Browse our public Requests for Discussion to get a flavor for how we work
Listen to Hiring Processes with Gergely Orosz to familiarize yourself with the Oxide hiring process.
Listen to some of our episodes of Oxide and Friends. A few recommendations:
Helios on the genesis of our illumos derivative as discussed in RFD 26
Holistic Boot on our approach to BIOS-free booting
Unshrouding Turin (or Benvenuto a Torino) on the work we’re doing for AMD’s Turin microprocessor
Holistic Engineering on our integrated hardware/software approach
Grown-up ZFS Data Corruption Bug on tracking down a long-standing data corruption bug in ZFS