Senior Embedded Linux Engineer

Apptronik is a human-centered robotics company developing AI-powered robots to support humanity in every facet of life. Our flagship humanoid robot, Apollo, is built to collaborate thoughtfully with people, starting with critical industries such as manufacturing and logistics, with future applications in healthcare, the home, and beyond. We operate at the cutting edge of embodied AI, applying our expertise across the full robotics stack to solve some of society's most important problems. You will join a team dedicated to bringing Apollo to market at scale, tackling the complex challenges like safety, commercialization, and mass production to change the world for the better. JOB SUMMARY At Apptronik, we are building humanoid robots that require an operating system as sophisticated and resilient as their hardware. As a Senior Embedded Linux Engineer, you will own the entire Linux platform ecosystem. You aren't just "using a build tool"; you are architecting a custom distribution from the ground up to ensure our robots are performant, secure, and field-ready. Your mission is to manage the full lifecycle of the OS: from factory provisioning and secure imaging to real-time kernel tuning and reliable OTA updates. You will ensure that every cycle of the CPU is optimized for our control loops and that our fleet remains stable. ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES Custom OS Architecture Distribution: Architect and maintain a custom, production-grade Linux distribution using Yocto, Buildroot, or an equivalent professional build system. Demonstrate complete ownership of the OS layers, managing the relationship between the bootloader, kernel, board support packages (BSPs), and user-space libraries. Develop and maintain a highly repeatable and well-documented build process that serves as the single source of truth for all robot compute modules. Hardware Enablement Performance Optimization: Perform low-level kernel configuration and tuning to meet the strict latency requirements of humanoid robotics. Implement core isolation and process priority optimization to ensure critical control loops have deterministic access to resources. Optimize the OS footprint and resource utilization (CPU, memory, and I/O) to maximize the efficiency of our Nvidia Jetson (Jetpack) and AMD64 platforms. Integrate and debug hardware drivers for peripherals, including Bluetooth (BlueZ), Wi-Fi, and specialized robotics sensors. Platform Resilience, Provisioning Updates: Factory Provisioning: Architect the workflows for initial device provisioning, including secure boot initialization, disk partitioning, and factory imaging processes. OTA Strategy: Own the end-to-end Over-the-Air (OTA) update architecture (A/B atomic updates) using frameworks like Mender, RAUC, or SWUpdate. System Stability: Implement OverlayFS or similar union-mount strategies to create a resilient, "unbreakable" system that supports read-only roots and safe factory resets. Platform Security Hardening Hardware Root of Trust Secure Boot: Architect and implement end-to-end Secure Boot chains (from BootROM to Kernel) using TPM 2.0 or Secure Enclaves to ensure only authenticated firmware and OS images execute on the robot. System Hardening Isolation: Implement Linux Security Modules (LSMs) such as SELinux or AppArmor to enforce mandatory access controls; utilize cgroups and namespaces to isolate critical robotics processes from non-critical telemetry. Cryptographic Infrastructure: Manage the lifecycle of device identity and cryptographic keys; oversee disk encryption (dm-crypt/LUKS) Infrastructure Tooling: Own the CI/CD pipeline for OS image generation, ensuring that builds are automated, tested, and traceable. Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for the platform architecture, build environment, and flashing procedures. Develop specialized diagnostic tools (Python/Bash) for system monitoring and field troubleshooting. SKILLS AND REQUIREMENTS OS Construction: Prov ... (truncated, view full listing at source)