Job Description & Details
This is a hands-on embedded systems role focused heavily on modern networking gear, specifically working with WiFi chipsets and residential gateways. Don't let the 'Jr.' title fool you—the requirements call for substantial systems-level experience in Linux and embedded C to handle tricky kernel bugs, driver crashes, and wireless protocols. If you like digging deep into network stacks, debugging firmware, and working with open-source router platforms, this gig offers plenty of real-world technical challenges.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your day will rarely look the same, but expect a heavy mix of feature development and aggressive debugging. You'll be configuring and maintaining WiFi radio stacks across Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Atheros chipsets, ensuring band steering and MU-MIMO actually behave nicely in the wild. A significant part of the job also involves building out cellular backup failover features—like getting a router to seamlessly tether to a mobile phone as a backup WAN path without dropping packets. You will be writing event-driven daemons, untangling OpenSync managers, and digging through kernel-level crash dumps when things go sideways.
The Core Tech Stack
Embedded C and Linux are non-negotiable here; you need to be extremely comfortable writing low-level software for ARM or MIPS SoCs. On top of that, you must have serious domain expertise in WiFi standards, networking, and kernel interfaces like CFG80211 and mac80211. Familiarity with OpenWrt, OpenSync, RDK-B, and tools like hostapd/wpa_supplicant will separate you from other applicants because the team relies on these frameworks daily to push cloud-managed configurations via OVSDB.
Interview Expectations
Expect the hiring team to grill you on Linux kernel internals and network driver behavior. They will likely ask you to explain how you would debug a hard-to-reproduce memory leak or a kernel panic happening deep inside a wireless driver stack, looking to see if you actually know your way around core dumps and gdb. They might also throw a networking scenario at you involving concurrent AP and STA operations or traffic steering logic during a WAN failover event, evaluating how you handle state machines and race conditions in multithreaded embedded environments.
Application Advice
Your resume needs to heavily highlight your hands-on experience with embedded Linux and networking protocols rather than just generic software engineering buzzwords. Explicitly mention any past work you've done with OpenWrt, OpenSync, wireless drivers, or socket-level programming to clear the automated ATS filters. Make sure your project bullets focus on tangible outcomes—like how you optimized throughput KPIs or debugged nasty race conditions in a resource-constrained embedded system.