Hardware Platform Engineer

Role Overview

You will own the hardware platform end-to-end, including evaluating and selecting computing and networking hardware, writing system-level tooling for performance monitoring and diagnostics, and ensuring our Linux environment is tuned for real-time, safety-critical workloads.  You’ll define what hardware Revel runs on and prove that it meets our reliability standards before it reaches the field.

Responsibilities

Hardware Selection & Qualification: Evaluate x86 and ARM computing platforms, networking equipment, and individual components (CPUs, SSDs, RAM, NICs) for deployment across demanding environments including test cells, benchtop setups, and remote field installations.  Establish hardware qualification criteria including thermal behavior, firmware stability, I/O throughput, vibration tolerance, ECC support, and component lifecycle.  Build and maintain an approved hardware compatibility matrix and manage vendor and supplier relationships.

Platform Bring-up & OS Integration: Bring up Linux on new hardware platforms, including kernel configuration, device tree setup, and driver validation.  Tune the OS for real-time performance with CPU isolation, IRQ affinity, and latency profiling.  Contribute to the OS image build and deployment pipeline.

Fleet Health & Diagnostics: Build tooling to monitor hardware health across a growing fleet of deployed systems such as tracking disk wear, thermal behavior, memory errors, firmware versions, and component lifecycle status.  Instrument these tools to feed into observability infrastructure (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana) for fleet-wide visibility.  Develop diagnostic utilities for performance characterization and failure triage, both in-house and in the field.

Platform Security: Implement and maintain platform-level security including Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, disk encryption, and image signing.  Design these controls for systems that operate in air-gapped environments with no connectivity to external services.

Hardware Validation Campaigns: Design and execute qualification campaigns for new hardware platforms.  Define test plans, acceptance criteria, pass/fail thresholds.  This includes thermal stress testing, burn-in cycles, latency profiling, I/O reliability testing, and long-duration stability runs.  Document results and make go/no-go recommendations for production deployment.  Re-validate when vendors ship component revisions or substitutions.

Qualifications

Experience: 3–5 years of professional experience working directly with hardware in Platform Engineering, Systems Programming, or Embedded Systems.  You should have hands-on experience evaluating, qualifying, or bringing up computing hardware.

Hardware Depth: A deep, first-principles understanding of computing hardware. You’re the person who reads datasheets, catches firmware quirks, flags EOL risk, and knows why one SSD is reliable under sustained load and another isn’t.

Linux Fundamentals: Strong understanding of the Linux kernel, boot process, and system configuration.  Experience tuning Linux for performance-sensitive or real-time workloads.

Systems Programming: Comfortable writing system-level tooling.  You’ll build hardware diagnostic utilities, performance benchmarks, and monitoring tools.  Our stack is primarily in Rust.  Strong systems programming experience in C/C++ with willingness to work in Rust is welcome.

Bring-up Expertise: Experience bringing up Linux on new hardware platforms, including BIOS/UEFI configuration, driver validation, and diagnosing boot and compatibility issues.  Comfortable with kernel configuration and device tree.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice to Have)

Nix / NixOS: Experience with Nix for reproducible, declarative system configurations.

Observability Tools: Familiarity with hardware monitoring via Grafana or Prometheus.

CI/CD: Experience with GitLab CI for automating platform builds and validation.

Sector Experience: Background working with high-reliability computing systems such as aerospace, defense, critical infrastructure, networking hardware, or hyperscale compute infrastructure.

Why Revel

You will join a high-velocity team where your work is the literal foundation of our technology. We offer the chance to work on "big iron" hardware problems while utilizing a modern, sophisticated software stack. If you are a hardware enthusiast who loves the low-level details of kernels and controllers and wants to see your work deployed on the world’s most critical systems, Revel is where you belong.