Senior Kernel / Virtualization Software Engineer (C, Rust)

Описание вакансии

#kernel #virtualization #remote

Senior Kernel / Virtualization Software Engineer (C, Rust)

Salary is up to 8500 usd gross

REMOTE, full-time, b2b contract, location of the candidate and legal entity, bank account of the candidate – outside of Russia, Belarus and Turkey

Company name - Ascendra Networks (They are still in stealth mode, so there are no actual website) – security domain

We are looking for a Senior Kernel/Virtualization Software Engineer to design and implement the core of our virtualization platform. You will work deep in the stack — writing and reviewing code at the boundary between the Linux kernel and userspace virtual machine monitors (VMMs), comparable to the work done in the KVM, QEMU,

and Firecracker projects. This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who is comfortable reading hardware manuals, debugging across the guest/host boundary, and reasoning about performance, isolation, and security at the lowest layers of the system.

Key Responsibilities

Design, implement, and maintain hypervisor and virtual machine monitor (VMM) components, including the device model, vCPU lifecycle, memory management,

and the KVM ioctl interface.

Develop and upstream Linux kernel code — KVM subsystem changes, device drivers, and kernel modules — and contribute fixes back to the relevant open-source communities.

Build and optimize lightweight VMMs in the spirit of Firecracker: minimal device emulation, fast boot, small attack surface, and strong tenant isolation for multi-tenant workloads.

Implement and harden virtual device emulation (virtio block, net, vsock, balloon) and paravirtualized interfaces between guest and host.

Profile and optimize boot time, memory footprint, and I/O throughput across the guest/host boundary; eliminate jitter and tail latency.

Diagnose complex, low-level bugs spanning the guest kernel, host kernel, and VMM using tools such as gdb, ftrace, perf, and crash dumps.

Partner with security to reason about isolation boundaries, side-channel

exposure, and the trusted computing base of the virtualization layer.

Review code from peers, mentor engineers on systems-level programming, and set technical direction for the virtualization roadmap.

Required Qualifications

7+ years of systems software engineering experience, with significant time spent in virtualization, hypervisors, operating systems, or low-level infrastructure.

Expert proficiency in C, plus strong working knowledge of Rust (the

implementation language of Firecracker and modern VMMs).

Experience with operating system internals: virtual memory, scheduling, interrupts, system calls, and the kernel/userspace boundary.

Direct experience with hardware-assisted virtualization (Intel VT-x/VT-d or AMD-V/SVM) and the KVM API.

Hands-on experience with one or more of KVM, QEMU, Firecracker, Cloud Hypervisor, or a comparable VMM/hypervisor codebase.

Familiarity with the virtio specification and paravirtualized device models.

Proven ability to debug across abstraction layers using gdb, ftrace, perf, and similar low-level tooling.

B2 English

Preferred Qualifications

Upstream contributions to the Linux kernel, QEMU, Firecracker, or another major virtualization project.

Experience building or operating multi-tenant, serverless, or container-runtime

platforms (e.g., microVM-backed functions or sandboxes).

Knowledge of confidential computing (Intel TDX, AMD SEV-SNP) or

memory-encryption technologies.

Experience with ARM64 virtualization in addition to x86_64.

Background in performance engineering, real-time systems, or security research.