Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Nabu Casa is the organization behind Home Assistant, the world's largest free and open-source smart home platform. They are seeking a Senior Embedded Linux OS Engineer to enable, maintain, and improve Home Assistant OS support across their hardware products, working closely with the Hardware Team and contributing to the open-source community.
Responsibilities
- Maintain and improve Home Assistant OS support for Nabu Casa hardware platforms, contributing where appropriate within the wider Home Assistant OS ecosystem
- Work closely with Home Assistant OS contributors and Open Home Foundation developers to improve platform support, resolve issues, and enable new hardware platforms
- Support board bring-up activities for new hardware products, including Buildroot configuration, board support packages (BSPs), bootloader configuration, partition layouts, and system services
- Optimise operating-system performance, hardware utilisation, stability, and reliability across supported devices
- Maintain and improve the Buildroot-based build infrastructure, ensuring builds remain reproducible, maintainable, and efficient
- Investigate and resolve platform-level issues including boot regressions, driver failures, hardware compatibility problems, update issues, kernel panics, and power-management defects
- Collaborate closely with the Hardware Team during development and validation of new boards. The Hardware Team owns hardware design and production; you ensure reliable operating-system support and compatibility
- Upstream patches as required to Linux, U-Boot, Buildroot, or other related open-source projects
- Work with silicon vendors, hardware partners, and open-source maintainers when required to improve platform support and resolve lower-level issues
- Contribute to operating-system security hardening and platform reliability improvements
- Help maintain healthy CI pipelines for operating-system builds and platform validation
- Document platform architecture, board support status, debugging procedures, known limitations, and key technical decisions
Skills
- Strong embedded Linux experience, including Buildroot, Yocto, or similar embedded operating system environments
- Deep understanding of Linux operating systems, system services, hardware bring-up, and platform reliability
- Experience with bootloaders, partition layouts, OTA update systems, and embedded device lifecycle management
- Comfort working across hardware and software boundaries, including reading hardware schematics and datasheets
- Experience with cross-compilation toolchains and low-level debugging tools such as serial consoles, GDB, strace, JTAG, oscilloscopes, or logic analysers
- Ability to read and write C/C++ for lower-level or driver-related work
- Strong Python skills for automation, tooling, and platform scripting
- Familiarity with security hardening practices for embedded operating systems
- Experience working with Home Assistant OS or similar embedded Linux platforms is a strong plus
- Hardware-native mindset — comfortable working directly with physical devices and embedded systems
- High autonomy and ownership — able to independently own complex platform areas end-to-end
- Strong debugging and troubleshooting mindset — able to methodically investigate unfamiliar systems and isolate problems using evidence rather than assumptions
- Comfortable learning unfamiliar systems quickly and moving across multiple technical layers including OS, hardware, drivers, automation, and platform tooling
- Community-minded and collaborative — comfortable contributing in public open-source environments with asynchronous communication and code review workflows
- Clear written communication skills and ability to work effectively in distributed remote teams
- Experience contributing to large open-source projects
- Familiarity with Home Assistant OS and the Home Assistant ecosystem
- Experience with Elixir or Nerves OS
- ARM or Raspberry Pi ecosystem experience
- Experience building embedded platforms for smart home or IoT products
- Experience maintaining systems deployed at large scale across distributed hardware environments
Benefits
- Five weeks (twenty-five days) of paid time off.
- Fourteen days of paid sick leave if your country/laws treat them as unpaid.
- Six weeks of paid and six weeks of unpaid parental leave to be used in the first year after birth.
- A budget for your work hardware once you start. After three years, you may keep this equipment for personal use.
- An annual smart home budget to ensure you keep up-to-date with the latest smart homes offer.
- An annual education budget to help you grow and stay on top of your game.
- A yearly performance bonus based on company performance.
- A 50% contribution to your internet connection fee at your home workspace.
- One day every two weeks to work on your personal projects.
- If you are currently working on Home Assistant-related side projects, you can spend work time maintaining them.
Company Overview