Software Maintenance Engineer- (Linux Kernel)

About the job:

The Red Hat Experience Engineering (XE) Sustaining Engineering team is looking for a Software Engineer to help lead a new team aimed at improving the long-term product experience of our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers. In this role, you will work closely with Product Engineering to deliver on extended product maintenance work, including handling defects, bugs, and CVEs in any extended life streams of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Focused on product development that goes beyond the normal 6 month maintenance phase of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) minor releases, you will actively lead EUS, TUS, E4S, AMC, and ELS lifestreams. You'll be actively leading all aspects of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) maintenance. You will co-lead our patch review process, the development and execution of backports and test plans, and the creation of automation tools to improve the efficiency, flexibility, and quality of Red Hats patch delivery to customers.

To succeed in this role, youll need to have the ability to think creatively and adapt to rapid change, as well as an eagerness to learn new things, and to innovate for process and quality efficiency.

What will you do?

• Contribute to the vision and innovation of new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product maintenance offerings, aiming to make Red Hat a global leader in long-term product experience
• Lead daily activities of product maintenance engineering teams, serving as a regional and global expert on pressing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) product issues
• Resolve and proactively address critical issues that have an impact on long-term regional or global business success of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
• Work within the complete Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) solutions portfolio and be responsible for the delivery of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) updates to the maintenance streams
• Lead developer and QE counterparts, product and project manager, and release engineering teams across the globe to ensure the development and delivery of fixes meet the schedule requirements and high quality standards expected and required by Red Hat customers
• Diagnose the root cause of failures
• Backport CVE and bug fixes to stable release streams
• Develop, maintain, and monitor tests and onboard automated tests into a continuous integration workflow as much as possible
• Develop onboarding and training for new team members
• Mentor junior team members

What will you bring?

• Outstanding debugging, troubleshooting, and analytical skills
• 2+ years of experience in software engineering and/or quality engineering
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related engineering field, or relevant professional experience
• Advanced level C coding skills
• Experience handling revisions and conflicts on Git.
  • Familiar with backporting patches, including straight merges and cherry picks, functionally equivalent backports, dependency resolution, etc.
  • Familiar with git concepts such as the merge request workflow, etc.
• Familiar with kernel internals, including but not limited to:
  • Maintainership workflow
  • Structure and its subsystems
• Familiar with userspace low-level internals, including but not limited to:
  • Processes
  • Kernel interface (syscalls, ioctl, etc.)
• Experience with building code from source and debug compilation failures, mainly with C language code
• Knowledgeable with low-level debugging tools like GDB and strace:
• Familiar with automated testing environments:
  • Jenkins jobs, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions.
• Good interpersonal, problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills

Experience with the following are considered a plus:

• Open Source contributions to upstream linux projects or interaction with the open source community.
• Understanding of any kernel subsystems such as networking, device drivers, etc.
• Familiar with advanced debugging tools like perf, eBPF, system tap and ftrace.
• Experience with unit and integration testing on any language or framework.
• Experience debugging test failures and filing issues.
• Experience with scripting languages like Python and/or Bash.
• Knowledge on container-driven solutions.
• Experience of collaborative problem solving