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Senior Embedded Linux OS Engineer (America)

Nabucasa

Remote · US

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About this role

About Nabu Casa

Nabu Casa https://www.nabucasa.com is the organisation behind Home Assistant https://www.home-assistant.io, the world's largest free and open-source smart home platform used by over two million households. We were founded to ensure the project's sustainability, and in 2024, we partnered with the Open Home Foundation to protect and promote a wide range of open-source initiatives. Our guiding principles—privacy, choice, and sustainability—are embedded in everything we do, from our architecture to our community.

We are a profitable company with no external investors. Our funding comes directly from users who subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud https://www.home-assistant.io/cloud/ and purchase Home Assistant hardware, ensuring our only stakeholders are our employees and our users. We also support other open-source projects, including those focused on hardware, standards, and voice technology.

The Role

As a Senior Embedded Linux OS Engineer, you are Nabu Casa's primary embedded Linux engineer within the Hardware Team, responsible for enabling, maintaining, and improving Home Assistant OS support across Nabu Casa hardware products.

Home Assistant OS is an open-source project stewarded by the Open Home Foundation. Nabu Casa develops and ships hardware products that run Home Assistant OS and contributes engineering effort to ensure those devices remain reliable, performant, secure, and well-supported throughout their lifecycle.

Working at the boundary between hardware and software, you help ensure Home Assistant OS runs reliably on Nabu Casa hardware platforms. You collaborate closely with the Hardware Team, Home Assistant OS contributors, and the Open Home Foundation to support existing devices, improve platform reliability, and enable new hardware platforms.

You are the primary technical owner for embedded Linux enablement within the Hardware Team. This includes Buildroot-based platform development, board support packages, bootloader configuration, hardware bring-up, platform debugging, and long-term maintainability.

This is a senior, hands-on engineering role requiring deep embedded Linux expertise and the ability to independently drive complex technical work from investigation through implementation with minimal supervision.

This is not a Linux kernel development role. It is an embedded Linux platform engineering role focused on Buildroot-based systems, hardware enablement, operating-system integration, platform reliability, and hardware support.

Core Responsibilities

- Maintain and improve Home Assistant OS support for Nabu Casa hardware platforms, contributing where appropriate within the wider Home Assistant OS ecosystem.

- Work closely with Home Assistant OS contributors and Open Home Foundation developers to improve platform support, resolve issues, and enable new hardware platforms.

- Support board bring-up activities for new hardware products, including Buildroot configuration, board support packages (BSPs), bootloader configuration, partition layouts, and system services.

- Optimise operating-system performance, hardware utilisation, stability, and reliability across supported devices.

- Maintain and improve the Buildroot-based build infrastructure, ensuring builds remain reproducible, maintainable, and efficient.

- Investigate and resolve platform-level issues including boot regressions, driver failures, hardware compatibility problems, update issues, kernel panics, and power-management defects.

- Collaborate closely with the Hardware Team during development and validation of new boards. The Hardware Team owns hardware design and production; you ensure reliable operating-system support and compatibility.

- Upstream patches as required to Linux, U-Boot, Buildroot, or other related open-source projects.

- Work with silicon vendors, hardware partners, and open-source maintainers when required to improve platform support and resolve lower-level issues.

- Contribute to operating-system security hardening and platform reliability improvements.

- Help maintain healthy CI pipelines for operating-system builds and platform validation.

- Document platform architecture, board support status, debugging procedures, known limitations, and key technical decisions.

What you need to have

Technical / functional:

- Strong embedded Linux experience, including Buildroot, Yocto, or similar embedded operating system environments

- Deep understanding of Linux operating systems, system services, hardware bring-up, and platform reliability

- Experience with bootloaders, partition layouts, OTA update systems, and embedded device lifecycle management

- Comfort working across hardware and software boundaries, including reading hardware schematics and datasheets

- Experience with cross-compilation toolchains and low-level debugging tools such as serial consoles, GDB, strace, JTAG, oscilloscopes, or logic analysers

- Ability to read and write C/C++ for lower-level or driver-related work

- Strong Python skills for automation, tooling, and platform scripting

- Familiarity with security hardening practices for embedded operating systems

- Experience working with Home Assistant OS or similar embedded Linux platforms is a strong plus

Ways of working:

- Hardware-native mindset — comfortable working directly with physical devices and embedded systems

- High autonomy and ownership — able to independently own complex platform areas end-to-end

- Strong debugging and troubleshooting mindset — able to methodically investigate unfamiliar systems and isolate problems using evidence rather than assumptions

- Comfortable learning unfamiliar systems quickly and moving across multiple technical layers including OS, hardware, drivers, automation, and platform tooling

- Community-minded and collaborative — comfortable contributing in public open-source environments with asynchronous communication and code review workflows

- Clear written commu

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