Hardware Infrastructure Engineer II

About the Role

CLEAR is looking for a Platform Engineer to join our Hardware Operations and Platform Engineering team. Sitting at the intersection of Site Reliability Engineering and Embedded Systems Integration, you will architect and maintain the software layer keeping thousands of Linux-based kiosks online, healthy, and self-healing across a distributed edge server fleet.

You will own everything from OS image management to over-the-air (OTA) updates, device observability, and system recovery, ensuring biometric kiosks deliver a consistent, frictionless experience.

What You Will Do

• Architect and implement OS-level watchdogs, process monitors, and self-healing mechanisms to ensure devices automatically recover from failures (service restarts, reboots, or rollbacks).
• Manage and enhance our OTA update framework to enable safe, atomic updates via A/B partition swapping and automated rollback when needed.
• Develop and maintain Python-based services that interact with connected peripherals (payment terminals, scanners, sensors) via vendor SDKs and serial interfaces.
• Own and maintain our custom Linux image (via Yocto, Buildroot, bootc, rpm-ostree, etc.), managing systemd units, udev rules, and security policies for a locked-down, production-grade environment.
• Build lightweight monitoring agents to stream logs, metrics, and telemetry (connectivity, performance, temperature) to centralized observability systems such as Datadog or Splunk.
• Work closely with software, SRE, and field operations teams to identify pain points and develop scalable solutions that improve reliability and ease of maintenance.

Who You Are

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering embedded Linux systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python for system automation, service orchestration, and hardware communication.
• Familiarity with A/B update mechanisms (RAUC, Mender, SWUpdate, or custom partition-switching logic).
• Experienced in serial communications (UART, RS-232, USB-serial) and SDK-based hardware integration.
• Deep knowledge of service dependencies, timers, and watchdog configuration.
• Familiarity with network observability and remote device management at fleet scale.
• Committed to operational excellence, focused on designing for resilience, testability, and safe rollback.
• Collaborative, pragmatic, and curious; equally comfortable debugging a kiosk in the field or improving CI/CD for edge devices.