Staff Kernel Security Engineer

About the Role

The Crusoe Cloud Software Development team is seeking an experienced Staff Software Engineer specializing in Linux Kernel Security. This role is essential in strengthening the security posture of our core Linux kernel and operating system components underpinning our hardware and software solutions for the AI cloud.

What You'll Be Working On

• Kernel Hardening & CVE Triage: Implement kernel security enhancements, manage configuration hardening, and triage incoming CVEs to assess severity and exploitability.
• Access Control, Boot Security & Guardrails: Enforce mandatory access controls, secure the boot path, and establish CI guardrails and fuzzing coverage to prevent regressions.
• Vulnerability Research & Analysis: Research vulnerabilities across kernel, driver, and OS components to build proactive mitigations and backport non-trivial upstream fixes to production.
• Secure Development Practices: Establish and advocate for secure coding standards and best practices for kernel-level development. Conduct security-focused code reviews in C.
• Security Auditing & Tools: Utilize and develop specialized tools for kernel security auditing, fuzzing, static analysis, and dynamic analysis.
• Incident Response Support: Provide expert support during security incidents involving kernel or OS-level compromises, assisting with root-cause analysis, containment, and recovery.
• Performance and Security Balance: Ensure security enhancements maintain high performance across AI infrastructure.
• Cloud Hypervisor & Isolation: Audit, harden, and reduce privilege across Cloud Hypervisor device models and vhost-user datapaths, contributing upstream fixes and advancing confidential computing primitives (AMD SEV-SNP, Intel TDX).
• Collaboration & Leadership: Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior engineers and collaborate across hardware, hypervisor, OS, and cloud infrastructure teams.

What You'll Bring to the Team

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Minimum of 5 years of relevant industry experience, with at least 3 years focused on low-level operating systems or kernel security.
• Proven deep knowledge of Linux kernel internals (memory management, process scheduling, system calls, I/O subsystems) with a security focus.
• Strong background in secure coding principles and experience conducting security-focused code reviews, particularly in C.
• Solid understanding of kernel vulnerabilities, exploitation techniques, and mitigations (ASLR, DEP/NX, SMEP/SMAP, KASLR, namespaces, cgroups, LSMs).
• Proficiency with kernel debugging tools (GDB, crash, kgdb) and security analysis tools (valgrind, address sanitizers, fuzzers).
• Familiarity with hardware-assisted security features (Intel SGX, AMD SEV, ARM TrustZone).
• Experience with CVE remediation and automation.
• Must be able to pass a background check.

Bonus Points

• Experience with specific kernel security projects or contributions to open-source kernel security initiatives.
• Familiarity with hypervisor security and guest kernel security interactions.
• Experience with HSMs or TPMs.
• Background in offensive security or penetration testing at the kernel level.