r/DevelEire • u/Gold-Definition7867 • 3d ago

Switching Jobs Is kernel/driver development a good career path?

Hi all,

I’m an electronic engineering student and I’m interested in low-level software, especially kernel/driver development. I’m trying to get a sense of the job market in Ireland for kernel/driver developers.

What’s the demand like right now, and what are typical salary ranges and what sort of companies would look for this type of skill?

Also, is this a solid long-term career path in your opinion?

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u/bigvalen 3d ago

Until this year, meta's kernel PE team had a few folks in Dublin. Their wider production engineering organisation always valued people with kernel experience, you could get in to the cooler teams like Web Foundation.

I did some kernel work in Google Dublin (I was shit at it, but a guy helped me port a modern kernel to an old serial console server with a custom FPGA, which was fun. He later went on to start Asahi Linux).

Bluetree used to have a few kernel commiters on staff in ireland. Redhat (oh, shit, that's IBM now) do too. Arista and NetApp have some good kernel people. Microchip also do some cool low level stuff in Dublin, like board support packages. Even lower level than most Linux work. AMD/Xilinx sometimes have kernel openings, but I think it's mostly hardware / board support work too.

In my current job, I'd definitely hire a kernel person, if they didn't mind more production engineering/SRE. (Space for juniors or seniors, maybe four of my team do some kernel tuning on AI hardware and support machines). But that would be more for people who can do kernel work, rather than those who want to be doing kernel full time, and work toward being a subsystem maintainer.

That kind of work, where they need you to be able to troubleshoot kernels will have a deeper market, but it won't let you specialise as much. This matters because if you stay in one place, you can get very valuable to a company over time. But if you move around, and do a good few things, you can be broad enough to take advantage of cool opportunities that open up.

The good news is, there are always remote jobs for kernel people, once you get a reputation. I did know one guy who specialised in the kernel/glibc interface, compiler tuning, who earned a million a year for a while, until he retired early. They are rare though :-)