Senior Embedded Linux OS Engineer

About Nabu Casa
Nabu Casa is the organisation behind Home Assistant, the world's largest free and open-source smart home platform used by over two million households.

Founded to ensure the sustainability of the project, Nabu Casa partners with the Open Home Foundation to protect and promote open-source initiatives. Its guiding principles—privacy, choice, and sustainability—are embedded in everything it does, from architecture to community engagement.

Nabu Casa is a profitable company with no external investors. Its funding comes directly from users who subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud and purchase Home Assistant hardware, ensuring that employees and users are its only stakeholders.

The Role
As a Senior Embedded Linux OS Engineer, you will be the primary embedded Linux engineer within the Hardware Team, responsible for enabling, maintaining, and improving Home Assistant OS support across Nabu Casa hardware products.

Home Assistant OS is an open‑source project stewarded by the Open Home Foundation. Nabu Casa develops and ships hardware that runs Home Assistant OS and contributes engineering effort to keep those devices reliable, performant, secure, and well‑supported throughout their lifecycle.

Working at the boundary between hardware and software, you will ensure that Home Assistant OS runs reliably on Nabu Casa hardware platforms. You will collaborate closely with the Hardware Team, Home Assistant OS contributors, and the Open Home Foundation to support existing devices, improve platform reliability, and enable new hardware platforms.

You will be the primary technical owner for embedded Linux enablement within the Hardware Team. This includes Buildroot‑based platform development, board support packages, boot loader configuration, hardware bring‑up, platform debugging, and long‑term maintainability.

This is a senior, hands‑on engineering role requiring deep embedded Linux expertise and the ability to independently drive complex technical work from investigation through implementation with minimal supervision.

Note:

This is not a Linux kernel development role. It focuses on Buildroot‑based systems, hardware enablement, operating‑system integration, platform reliability, and hardware support.

Core 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), boot loader 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, and 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.

Qualifications

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.

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