Lead Systems Software Engineer

Rivet Industries•Washington, DC

4d•$250,000 - $300,000

About The Position

As a Lead Systems Software Engineer, you'll work with a team of committed engineers to build the foundation of our device platform - from the OS layer to secure containers and lightweight services. You will own the core pieces of Android and Linux systems that scale across resource-constrained, multi-node environments.

Requirements

5+ years of experience building and maintaining Android and/or Linux system-level code and framework extensions (AOSP, custom ROMs, HALs, device drivers, kernel configuration) in an enterprise environment.
Strong software architecture fundamentals with the ability to design systems that are secure, scalable, extensible, and robust.
Experience with networking fundamentals and low-latency communication protocols, both IPC and RPC (e.g., gRPC, protobuf, AIDL, libzmq).
Experience integrating custom hardware and peripherals into Android and Linux environments.
Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for system image generation, AOSP builds, and firmware packaging.
Familiarity with automated testing strategies for embedded and system-level software, including hardware-in-the-loop and integration testing.
Experience with OTA update infrastructure, including image delivery, staged rollouts, and rollback mechanisms.
Familiarity with secure boot, TPM, certificate chains, system integrity verification, and other low-level security primitives.
A security-first mindset with practical experience hardening real-world systems.
Experience working on devices and systems with resource constraints (thermal, power, compute).
Effective communication and collaboration across engineering disciplines.

Nice To Haves

Experience with defense-related security frameworks and protocols (ITAR, security classifications, STIG, encryption).
Distributed systems experience, including service discovery, health monitoring, fault tolerance, and graceful degradation across multi-node systems.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and maintain system-level platform code across Android and Linux, including AOSP customizations, system services, init processes, and kernel modules.
Architect scalable, extensible, secure, and robust systems. Lead a team to execute on those designs as requirements evolve.
Develop and maintain Linux-based services for inter-device communications, message queuing, and observability pipelines.
Interface with hardware teams to maintain drivers and integrate custom hardware and peripherals.
Build and manage immutable system images, secure and reproducible environments, including certificate signing, sandboxing, and runtime hardening.
Define, implement, and enforce system policy, network configurations, authentication, and enterprise integrations for Android and Linux-based devices.
Align coding and deployment practices with regulatory and high-assurance frameworks.
Collaborate across engineering disciplines (software, electrical, mechanical) to inform constraints and requirements.
Ship pragmatic, secure, and well-documented systems that scale.