Senior Staff Software Engineer, Linux Kernel

About the role

Efficient Computer is rethinking computing from the ground up to solve one of AI's biggest challenges: energy. Our Fabric architecture delivers a 10–100x improvement in energy efficiency for general-purpose computation, including AI, while supporting familiar programming languages and software frameworks—unlocking new possibilities for autonomous machines, intelligent infrastructure, wearables, and space systems. With our first processor, Electron E1, now shipping in volume and more than $97 million in Series B financing recently announced, we're accelerating customer deployments and scaling our architecture to data center performance. Join us to build the hardware and software that bring intelligence wherever it's needed and help shape the next generation of computing.

Efficient Computer is building the next generation of energy efficient, general-purpose processors designed around the Fabric architecture, a novel spatial dataflow design spun out from decades of fundamental SOC research at CMU.

We are looking for a Senior Staff Linux Kernel Driver Engineer to own the kernel-mode driver that brings our Fabric to life. You will bring up new silicon from the very first boot, often before the silicon exists, working in QEMU, functional simulation, emulation, and FPGA environments to make sure our runtime software layers work on day one.

This is a key role for the System Software team: you will work closely with architecture, micro-architecture, verification and compiler teams during pre-silicon development and bring-up.

Key Responsibilities

Own the Kernel Driver

- Design, implement, and maintain the Linux kernel-mode driver for the Fabric accelerator. This includes device discovery and probe, MMIO register interfaces, interrupt handling, command and completion queue management, power management, firmware, chip diagnostics, logging and device health, as well as abstracting the user-space ABI with a HAL that the runtime depends on.

- Define how custom hardware accelerators are exposed to Linux: ioctl and sysfs interfaces, and the submission and synchronization model between application cores and the Fabric.

- Keep the driver clean, upstreamable in style, and portable across kernel and device versions.

- Implement the unified memory model between ARM cores and the Fabric accelerator.

- Own SMMU (IOMMU) integration: stream and context configuration, tensor pool allocation, page table management, stage-1 and stage-2 translation, shared virtual addressing, and fault handling.

Drive Pre-Silicon Bringup and Platform Enablement

- Build and maintain QEMU device models and board definitions for the Fabric and its SoC so that the kernel, driver, and runtime can be developed and tested before silicon.

- Own the Linux boot path on new platforms: boot firmware handoff, device tree, kernel configuration, early console, and root filesystem, from the first boot in emulation through FPGA prototypes to production silicon.