Lead and mentor a team of engineers in Linux Kernel and systems development, overseeing delivery, debugging, and team performance.
Available Locations: London, UK
What You'll Do
What You'll Bring
What You'll Do
- Lead and Mentor: Manage a high-performing team of kernel and systems engineers, fostering a culture of "collaboration-first" and continuous knowledge sharing both internally and with the global open-source community.
- Own the OS Lifecycle: Oversee the end-to-end delivery of the Linux Kernel and core OS components. Your goal is a fully automated continuous delivery pipeline that moves from merge to 100% production in less than 30 days.
- Drive Technical Vision: Steer the Cloudflare kernel development roadmap. You will balance the need for cutting-edge features with the absolute requirements of production stability, security, and performance.
- Upstream Advocacy: Promote a "minimal patch" philosophy by ensuring your team is a top contributor to the Linux Kernel. You will support engineers in becoming upstream maintainers for critical subsystems.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Act as a consultant to hardware and service teams, helping them onboard new hardware and optimize workloads for our OS. You'll lead a "virtual team" environment where any engineer at Cloudflare can contribute to the kernel.
- Innovate Debugging: Tackle the "impossible" challenges of kernel-level debugging. You will lead the development of automated systems that collect critical telemetry when a system crashes, even when traditional debuggers cannot run.
- Measure Success: Use DORA metrics and team-specific capabilities - such as the "time to fix a kernel issue" and upstream commit volume - to track and improve team impact.
What You'll Bring
- Systems Leadership: 5+ years of experience managing engineering teams, ideally in low-level systems, kernel development, or large-scale infrastructure environments.
- Low-Level Expertise: A deep understanding of Linux Kernel internals, x86/ARM architecture, and OS design fundamentals. You should be comfortable discussing memory management, schedulers, and network stacks.
- Automation Mindset: Experience building or managing CI/CD pipelines for foundational software. You believe that "toil" is a bug and automation is the feature.
- Open Source Pedigree: A proven track record of engaging with the open-source community. You understand the nuances of upstreaming and how to navigate community dynamics effectively.
- Operational Empathy: An understanding of the unique challenges of a global "reboot-limited" production environment. You prioritize stability and have experience with pre-production QA and synthetic workload evaluation.
- Strategic Communication: The ability to translate complex kernel-level obstacles into actionable business insights for stakeholders across the company.
- Resilience: You aren't intimidated by the "impossible." Whether it's a non-reproducible race condition or an unwelcoming upstream thread, you lead your team through the challenge with a pragmatic, solution-oriented mindset.
Top Skills
Arm
Automation
Ci/Cd
Linux Kernel
X86
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