Firmware & OS Engineering Manager

Openchip is building exciting new RISC-V chips with HPC and AI acceleration.

As a Firmware and Operating Systems Engineering Manager, you will manage a team developing low- (BIOS, firmware, device drivers) and mid-level software (emulation, simulation, and virtualization) to enable the use of Openchip’s novel hardware features and accelerators, allowing the development of systems that use the hardware to its full performance and take advantage of its security, power management, and reliability features.

Key Responsabilities

· Manage a team of engineers working in the relevant technical space. In particular:

· Create a welcoming work environment in their org and strive for reports’ motivation, well-being, and professional growth opportunities.

· Provide technical and professional guidance to their reports. Give feedback, priorities, and higher- level context.

· Take part in task tracking and assignment, monitoring their reports’ workloads as well as how tasks are contributing to development and business goals.

· Host regular 1:1 and team-wide meetings for frequent communication and overall team awareness.

· Host regular performance conversations with reports and complete the periodical performance appraisal process for their team. Determine clear performance goals, keep track of their progress, and take part in promotion decisions following the established processes.

· Determine the needs for individual- and team-level career development and training. Host regular career conversations with reports.

· Work with HR to handle special situations (e.g., medical leave).

· Ensure the appropriate growth of the team: identify the need of new positions, define job profiles, work with HR to create and filter candidate pools, coordinate and take part in interview panels, make final hiring decisions.

· Understand the technical landscape of their project and make decisions about it.

· Lead their team in the execution and delivery of their commitments, which may include:

· Develop and maintain low-level software (BIOS and firmware) for novel hardware architectures.

· Develop and maintain device drivers for operating systems (mainly Linux) to expose novel hardware features (e.g., telemetry) and acceleration, as well as to support their emulation and virtualization.

· Provide monitoring, instrumentation, and telemetry to export system status and health metrics.

· Provide workload control and configuration, and API entry points to allow remote operation.

· Configure and extend emulation, simulation, and virtualization software.

· Make occasional independent technical contributions, often for the most foundational or challenging parts of the project.

· Interact with engineers and leads from their and other teams to unblock issues, or to reach consensus on technical topics. In particular:

· Work with hardware teams, influencing hardware/software co-design.

· Work with teams developing middleware, and/or contribute to middleware.

· Review team artifacts (design documents, code changes) both for correctness but also for code quality and consistency.

· Identify opportunities for code and/or process improvement.

· Loop in directors and above as needed, for instance to surface potential risks or get feedback based on area-level technical knowledge.

· Collaborate with program managers for task and deliverable tracking, as well as process improvements.

· Communicate outside the team, explaining and divulging technical topics to less technical parts of the organization.

Required qualifications

Technical skills

• Bachelor or Master’s degree in a relevant field.
• Experience in the relevant field (more than 10 years).
• Solid knowledge about computer architecture (CPU, cache and memory hierarchy, buses,. . . ).
• Good understanding of pre-boot and boot process, and Linux kernel internals.
• Knowledge about compilation and linking process (toolchains, object file formats, binutils, dynamic load- ing,. . . ).
• Solid knowledge of low-level development languages (C, Rust).
• Experience with assembly language (of any architecture).
• Experience with standard tools for source control (git), continuous integration, task management (Jira).

Soft skills

• Within- and cross-team collaboration at the technical level.
• More than 3 years of experience in managing small-sized teams (3-7 engineers).

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with RISC-V development at the assembly-language level.
• Experience with kernel and/or device driver development.
• Experience with emulators and simulators (Qemu, Gem5, Spike).
• Experience with hypervisor technology (KVM, Xen).
• Experience with open source software development.
• Experience with system boot technology (UEFI/EDK2, ACPI, u-boot, devicetree).

What do we offer?

• Join an innovative team and experience company growth.
• We believe in investing in our employees and providing them with the opportunities they need to grow and develop their careers.
• Enjoy a hybrid work environment.
• We also offer flexible schedule.
• We offer a remuneration that values your experience.

If you feel identified with Openchip, please contact us. We can offer a competitive compensation package in a flexible work schema that will help you to keep a balance between your personal and professional life.

At Openchip & Software Technologies S.L., we believe a diverse and inclusive team is the key to groundbreaking ideas. We foster a work environment where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered to reach their full potential – regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity.