Senior Robotics Software Engineer - Sentry Tower, Compute Platform Integration

About The Team

The Sentry Tower Software team develops robotic systems that provide force protection capabilities, monitoring the perimeter of secure areas, land or sea, for approaching people, vehicles, and vessels. We live in a world where security officers are increasingly overwhelmed by sensor data feeds. Our products leverage advanced sensor fusion and autonomy to seamlessly render activity in the environment to Lattice’s common operating picture.

About the Job

Underneath every Sentry Tower is a custom carrier board wrapped around an NVIDIA Jetson module, with cameras, radars, CAN-connected sensor boards, GPS, radios, and motor controllers hanging off it. Between the vendor’s board support package and our product sits a layer that has to be owned deliberately: the boot chain, the device tree, and the guarantee that every piece of hardware on the board comes up and works when our image boots. We’re hiring a Senior Software Engineer to own that layer.

This role sits at the seam between our platform organization, which maintains the underlying NixOS platform and vendor BSP integration, and the Sentry product, which has to actually boot and run on real towers. You will be our technical counterpart to that team: raising and driving platform issues on our behalf, evaluating what upstream changes mean for our hardware, and building the product-side integration that makes a platform release work for us. You are the person who can say precisely why a tower doesn’t come up, and whether the fix belongs to us or to the platform.

The core of the work is the boot chain and the hardware that hangs off it. You will debug boot end to end, from firmware through UEFI to the unified kernel image, meaning the kernel, its command line, and the initrd, and out into a running NixOS system with encrypted storage mounted and every peripheral enumerated. When a carrier board’s pin assignments change, when a peripheral doesn’t appear, or when a bootloader trips over a device it shouldn’t be probing, you produce the device tree change or the kernel patch that fixes it. You will also own our compute generations through their lifecycle, sustaining and security-patching deployed hardware while newer generations come up in parallel.

Our Product: https://www.anduril.com/sentry

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Own the boot path end to end on every compute generation we ship: firmware, UEFI, the unified kernel image and its command line, initrd, encrypted root unlock, and the handoff into a fully running NixOS system.
• Guarantee full hardware availability at boot: every bus, peripheral, and network interface present, correctly named, and functional, with deterministic enumeration that survives platform and kernel upgrades.
• Own carrier board device trees: reading pinout and pinmux definitions from hardware engineering, producing and maintaining the corresponding DTS, DTSI, and overlay changes, and validating them on real boards.
• Produce kernel, bootloader, and BSP patches when our hardware needs behavior the vendor tree doesn’t provide, and carry those patch sets forward across platform upgrades.
• Serve as our primary technical liaison to the platform organization: file and drive issues with clear reproductions, review upstream changes for impact on our hardware, and land product-side integration for new platform releases.
• Sustain deployed compute generations through vendor lifecycle transitions, applying security patches and backports so fielded systems stay stable and supportable while newer platforms come online.
• Support new hardware bring-up alongside electrical engineers and our platform team, owning the boot and device tree side of getting a new board to a validated, production-flashable state.
• Debug the hard ones: intermittent bus errors, thermal and power-related faults, boot hangs, and failures that only reproduce on one unit in the field.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 4+ years of professional software engineering with substantial embedded Linux platform, board support, or kernel-adjacent integration work.
• Deep understanding of the embedded Linux boot chain: firmware and bootloader stages, UEFI, kernel and initrd, kernel command line, root filesystem mounting, and how each stage fails.
• Device tree fluency: reading and modifying DTS, DTSI, and overlays for custom hardware, and connecting a pinout or pinmux specification to the resulting device tree.
• Ability to read, patch, and debug kernel and BSP source in C, plus proficiency in Rust or C++ for the userspace services that depend on your platform.
• Practical peripheral and bus knowledge across CAN, I2C, SPI, UART, PCIe, USB, and multi-port Ethernet, sufficient to determine whether a device is missing, misconfigured, or broken.
• Comfort debugging real hardware: serial consoles, boot logs, dmesg archaeology, and reading schematics and datasheets to answer your own questions.
• Demonstrated success driving technical work through another team, with the clarity and persistence to get a platform or vendor issue resolved rather than worked around.
• Comfort owning software on hardware that is already deployed, where a regression reaches real systems and a fix has to be safe as well as correct.
• US person status required, with eligibility to obtain and maintain a US security clearance.

NICE TO HAVE

• Direct NVIDIA Jetson experience: JetPack, Tegra, Jetson Linux BSP, or flashing and provisioning workflows.
• Experience with declarative configuration and reproducible builds. Nix or NixOS is what we use and what we most want to see; adjacent depth in Bazel, Buildroot, or Yocto is a solid substitute.
• Experience with secure boot, signed kernels, or measured boot on embedded platforms.
• Hardware lab skills: oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, bus analyzers, or JTAG.
• Upstream Linux kernel contributions.
• Python for bring-up scripting, test automation, and generating device trees from hardware pinout definitions.

US Salary Range 191000 - 254000 USD