Engineer – Linux Kernel Development

Qualcomm — Hyderabad, Telangana

₹5–11 LPA (HireSetu estimate) · 1–3 yrs exp · Full-time

HireSetu listing reference 693d79 — confirm requirements below, then apply on the employer site.

Quick answer: The gate is expert-level C plus real depth in one kernel subsystem, and the day-to-day leans hard on debugging: T32, gdb, crash dumps, tracing. Qualcomm's own degree math matters too, because a bachelor's with under two years gets filtered before your patches say anything.

From Qualcomm's job posting

Job Area

Engineering Group, Engineering Group > Software Engineering

General Summary

As a leading technology innovator, Qualcomm pushes the boundaries of what's possible to enable next-generation experiences and drives digital transformation to help create a smarter, connected future for all. As a Qualcomm Software Engineer, you will design, develop, create, modify, and validate embedded and cloud edge software, applications, and/or specialized utility programs that launch cutting-edge, world class products that meet and exceed customer needs. Qualcomm Software Engineers collaborate with systems, hardware, architecture, test engineers, and other teams to design system-level software solutions and obtain information on performance requirements and interfaces.

Minimum Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 2+ years of Software Engineering or related work experience.

OR

Master's degree in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field and 1+ year of Software Engineering or related work experience.

OR

PhD in Engineering, Information Systems, Computer Science, or related field.

  • 2+ years of academic or work experience with Programming Language such as C, C++, Java, Python, etc.

​Job function

Work on Linux Kernel development for enabling and supporting Qualcomm Snapdragon Chipsets and products

Skills/experience

  • 1-3 years of Software Engineering or related work experience.
  • Excellent knowledge of OS fundamentals, data structure, Linux kernel and the device driver model
  • Excellent programming skills and expert level knowledge of C
  • Specific experience and expertise in any of kernel subsystems – core kernel, device drivers, memory, SMMU, ARM subsystems etc.
  • Highly skilled in debug using any debugger like T32, gdb and crash analysis sing T32, crash utility etc.
  • Expert in using tracing and other related tools to identify performance bottlenecks and solve them
  • Well versed with other development tools like tool chain, version control etc.
  • Background experience in Android is a plus

Responsibilities

Work with cross teams to develop and support various features in Linux kernel to support Android on Qualcomm Snapdragon Chipsets

  • Work on latest bleeding edge ARMv9 CPUs and features
  • Closely work with power and performance to analyze and identify performance bottlenecks and implement optimizations.
  • Enable and support other teams that use supported Linux kernel features
  • Identify and support core set of tools for assisting Linux Kernel development, debug and support
  • Education requirements: Bachelors or Masters in CS or ECE

Text from Qualcomm's official job posting, formatted by HireSetu. The employer's own page is the final word on details.

HireSetu's note

The bar behind 1 to 3 years

Two experience lines sit in this posting. The qualifications ask for a bachelor's plus 2 years, or a master's plus 1 year, or a fresh PhD. The skills list says 1 to 3 years. Read that as a team band sitting above a hiring floor: a BE with 14 months on the clock falls under the stated minimum, and the 1 to 3 line won't change the outcome. A master's with a year, or a PhD straight from campus, clears it. Android is named as a plus, so kernels you've built and flashed on your own phone belong on the CV.

Debugging carries the weight

The subsystem list is wide: core kernel, drivers, memory, SMMU, ARM. Few engineers are deep in all of it, and the posting doesn't demand that. What it treats as non-negotiable is debug skill, with the tools named: T32, gdb, the crash utility, tracing for performance work.

Kernel faults surface as panics, hangs and memory corruption far from the line that caused them, and reading a dump is faster than reading code. If your debugging so far means printf and a rerun, that's the gap. Load a vmcore in crash, walk a stack trace, get comfortable with tracing output.

A week on the Snapdragon kernel

Expect the week to look like upstream work. Rebasing and forward-porting patches onto newer kernels, keeping drivers alive across SoC revisions, fixing regressions reported by other teams, and sitting with power and performance engineers to work out why a workload slowed down on a new ARMv9 part. Enabling other teams mostly means explaining why a feature behaves as it does. The target is Android on Qualcomm's own silicon, so the code you touch reaches phones. The job is in Hyderabad; ask how much of the week needs you near boards and lab hardware, since bring-up work ties you to it.

Ground to have cold

OS fundamentals and data structures are named first, and in kernel work they decide whether you can reason about a bug at all. Locking and concurrency, scheduling, page tables and memory layout, the probe and remove side of the driver model, and what an IOMMU does to device addresses, SMMU being ARM's version of it. Expert C here means pointers, memory layout and reading unfamiliar kernel code without a map. Java and Python appear in the skills list, though C is the one that decides the hire.

Drafted with AI from Qualcomm's job posting and checked by Prashanth Jakkula before publishing. See our Editorial Policy.

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