Systems Verification & Concurrent Kernel Architecture Research Intern

This internship is a 3-month intensive study to determine the practical limits of using automated formal methods to guarantee the safety of concurrent kernel primitives.

Mission:
Transitioning a kernel from a monolithic "Big Kernel Lock" to fine‑grained concurrency is a high-risk engineering challenge.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Design Logic (TLA+/Spin):
  Formalize locking protocols to mathematically prove the absence of deadlocks and circular waits.
• Implementation Audit (ESBMC/CBMC):
  Apply Bounded Model Checking to C source code to exhaustively scan for data races, pointer safety, and invariant violations.
• Hardware Mapping:
  Verify the placement of memory barriers to prevent hardware-level synchronization failure on modern CPUs.
• AI-Augmented Scaling:
  Leverage LLMs as an "Inference Engine" to synthesize formal in variants and environment harnesses, then critically audit the results for logical soundness.

Qualifications:

• Currently pursuing or completed a PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related field with relevant research projects and publications.
• Low-Level Systems Mastery:
  Deep proficiency in C; ability to reason about memory alignment, volatile keywords, and hardware interrupts.
• Comfortable reading ARMv8 assembly to ensure compiler optimizations haven't compromised synchronization.
• Concurrent Intuition:
  Visceral understanding of L1/L2 cache coherency (MESI), lock hierarchies, and why a "correct" C program can fail on weak-memory hardware if barriers are missing.
• Formal & Logical Rigor:
  Ability to model software as a discrete state‑machine; prefer a "proof of absence" over a "proof of presence".
• Persistence in face of state-space explosion or cryptic model-checker errors; detective capable of pruning models to find interleaving failures.

Compensation:

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $38.00 - $46.00 per hour. The compensation includes only the base salary and does not include bonus, equity, or benefits.