About the role
The Compute Platform team writes the software that makes the rest of the stack safe to run: the real-time operating layer, drivers, health monitoring and the deterministic scheduling of every process that touches the vehicle. If a message arrives late or a core stalls, the system has to know and respond within a bounded time.
Perception wants more compute, Controls wants tighter jitter and Safety wants evidence that neither compromises the other. You work across all three, deciding what runs where, on which core, with what priority and what happens when it fails. Practices from the Parent company security group, such as secure boot and signed updates, are built into the same platform so one codebase can serve other Clexerl machines.
Code here is written for review and for proof: static analysis, coding standards, fault injection and timing measurement are part of normal delivery.
What you’ll do
- Develop real-time software in C and C++ for automotive-grade processors, with bounded execution time and no dynamic allocation on critical paths.
- Build and verify drivers and middleware for sensors and actuators over CAN, automotive Ethernet and PCIe, including time synchronisation.
- Design watchdogs, health monitors and degraded-mode transitions that detect hung tasks, memory faults and stale data.
- Measure and reduce worst-case latency and jitter using tracing, cache and interrupt analysis, and priority and affinity tuning.
- Work with safety engineers to meet coding standards, produce traceable requirements and write tests that support the safety case.
- Support secure boot, over-the-air update and rollback mechanisms so the vehicle can be updated without being left in an unknown state.
What you’ll bring
- Experience writing production embedded software for safety-relevant systems, in automotive, aerospace, medical or industrial settings.
- Deep working knowledge of C and C++ for constrained targets, including memory layout, atomics, interrupts and undefined behaviour.
- Familiarity with an RTOS or real-time Linux configuration, scheduling policies, priority inversion and mixed-criticality partitioning.
- Experience debugging with oscilloscopes, logic analysers, JTAG and tracing tools, not only with a host debugger.
- Understanding of standards such as MISRA C or CERT C, and of how ISO 26262 shapes development practice.
- A cautious, evidence-first approach: you want to measure the worst case, not argue that it is probably fine.
Nice to have
- Experience with AUTOSAR Adaptive or Classic, or with ROS 2 executors tuned for deterministic latency.
- Knowledge of hypervisors and partitioning for mixed-criticality workloads on a shared SoC.
- Experience with Rust in embedded or safety-oriented contexts.
- Familiarity with PTP or gPTP time synchronisation across sensors and compute units.
Work you might take on
- 01
Move a sensor ingest path to a fixed-priority real-time thread with pre-allocated buffers and cut end-to-end jitter to a published bound.
- 02
Build a fault-injection harness that stalls cores, drops messages and corrupts frames, and verify every injected fault is detected in time.
- 03
Implement an A/B partition update scheme with automatic rollback if the health monitor fails after reboot.
- 04
Write a timing analysis report for the planning-to-actuation chain showing worst-case latency under full compute load.
Compensation
$190K – $310K
The US base salary range for this role. Every offer also includes equity in Clexerl and, when it spins out, in the venture you help build. We tell you the reasoning behind your number.
Benefits
Health, fully covered
Medical, dental and vision for you and your dependants, premiums paid in full.
Two kinds of equity
Equity in Clexerl, plus a stake in the venture you help build when it spins out.
22 weeks parental leave
Fully paid, for every parent, however your family arrives.
Rest that sticks
Flexible time off with a four-week minimum we actually check on, plus a company-wide week in December.
Learning and compute
A yearly budget for courses, conferences and books, and compute credits for side projects.
401(k) with a 4% match
Matched from your first paycheque and vested immediately.
How we hire
Apply 5 minutes
Send links to what you have built and a few lines on why this role. No cover letter needed.
Intro call 30 minutes
A conversation with the hiring manager about the work, the team and what you want next.
Work sample 2–4 hours
A paid take-home or a pairing session on a real-shaped problem. You pick the format.
Studio day One day
Meet the team, go deep on your work and ours. Remote or in person.
Offer Within 5 days
A written offer with the full range, the equity and the reasoning behind both.
Opens an email with a short template. Links beat résumés.