PCIe Driver Engineer

Location: Bengaluru
Experience: 4–7 Years
Employment Type: Full-Time

Role Overview

We are looking for an experienced Linux Kernel Driver Engineer with strong expertise in kernel-level development, PCIe device drivers, and low-level hardware communication.

The candidate will be responsible for developing and maintaining Linux kernel drivers for custom hardware, building robust transport and abstraction layers, and working closely with hardware/FPGA teams to debug, optimize, and validate high-performance device communication.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain Linux kernel device drivers for custom hardware.
• Develop and enhance PCIe-based device drivers and low-level communication interfaces.
• Implement driver initialization, Memory-Mapped I/O (MMIO), interrupt handling, and synchronization mechanisms.
• Work with MSI/MSI-X interrupts, DMA, memory management, and kernel synchronization primitives.
• Design and develop a transport/abstraction layer that provides a stable and efficient interface to upper-layer software.
• Optimize high-performance data paths for throughput, latency, and reliability.
• Implement robust error handling, fault recovery, and device recovery mechanisms.
• Develop diagnostic utilities, test hooks, and debugging tools to support software and hardware bring-up.
• Analyze and debug kernel crashes, race conditions, timing issues, deadlocks, and performance bottlenecks.
• Work closely with hardware and FPGA teams to understand register maps, hardware specifications, and device behavior.
• Debug hardware/software interactions using low-level debugging and system-level analysis.
• Contribute to kernel code reviews, patch development, maintenance, and release activities.
• Work with kernel build systems, source-control tools, and standard patch workflows.

Required Skills

• 4–7 years of hands-on experience in Linux kernel development.
• Strong expertise in Linux kernel device driver development, particularly PCIe drivers.
• Excellent programming skills in C.
• Strong understanding of C++ application development and its interaction with low-level/kernel components.
• Deep understanding of:
  • PCIe architecture and device communication
  • MMIO and register-level programming
  • MSI/MSI-X interrupts
  • DMA and high-performance data transfer
  • Kernel synchronization and locking
  • Concurrency and multithreading
  • Linux kernel subsystems
• Proven experience debugging:
  • Kernel crashes
  • Race conditions
  • Deadlocks
  • Timing-related issues
  • Memory-related issues
  • Driver/hardware interaction problems
• Ability to understand and work from hardware interface specifications, register maps, and hardware design documents.
• Good understanding of Linux kernel build systems, source control, patch management, and code review workflows.

Good-to-Have Skills

• Experience developing high-throughput or low-latency data paths.
• Experience with FPGA-based systems, prototyping boards, or embedded hardware platforms.
• Knowledge of Linux kernel performance tuning and profiling.
• Experience with kernel tracing and debugging tools.
• Exposure to hardware bring-up and system-level validation.
• Understanding of DMA engines, IOMMU, BARs, and PCIe enumeration.
• Experience working in collaborative hardware/software development environments.

Education

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Electronics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.

Preferred Candidate Profile

The ideal candidate should have strong hands-on experience in Linux kernel and PCIe driver development, excellent C programming skills, and the ability to work at the intersection of hardware, firmware, kernel, and application software.

Strong debugging skills, low-level hardware understanding, and experience developing reliable high-performance data paths will be highly valued.