Principal Kernel Engineer

About Huawei Research and Development UK Limited

Founded in 1987, Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. We have 207,000 employees and operate in over 170 countries and regions, serving more than three billion people around the world.

Our vision and mission is to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. To this end, we will drive ubiquitous connectivity and promote equal access to networks; bring cloud and artificial intelligence to all four corners of the earth to provide superior computing power where you need it, when you need it; build digital platforms to help all industries and organizations become more agile, efficient, and dynamic; redefine user experience with AI, making it more personalized for people in all aspects of their life, whether they’re at home, in the office, or on the go.

This spirit of innovation has led Huawei to work in close partnership with leading academic institutions in the UK to develop and refine the latest technologies. With a shared commitment to innovation and progress, both parties have worked together to achieve common goals and establish a strong partnership. The partnership between UK and Huawei help to develop the technologies of the future that will transform the way we all communicate, work and live.

For the past 30 years we have maintained an unwavering focus, rejecting shortcuts and easy opportunities that don't align with our core business. With a practical approach to everything we do, we concentrate our efforts and invest patiently to drive technological breakthroughs.

This strategic focus is a reflection of our core values:

• Staying customer-centric,

• Inspiring dedication,

• Persevering,

• Growing by reflection.

Huawei Research and Development UK Limited Overview

Huawei’s vision is a fully connected, intelligent world. To achieve this, we work to inspire passion for basic research around the world. Our combined passion drives development across the global innovation value chain. Huawei has the largest Research and Development organization in the world with 96,000+ employees in research centers around the globe. In the UK, we already have design centers in Cambridge, London, Edinburgh and Ipswich. We continue to explore and define new research directions and new services. We have expanded our collaborations with academic researchers; researched new network architectures, integration of communications and key enabling technologies; and developed the fundamental theories of these technologies. We invite you to join us on this exciting journey and drive your career forward.

Job Summary

We are seeking a Principal Kernel Engineer to join at Huawei R&D UK, Cambridge, driving deep kernel performance and power optimization for flagship mobile platforms. You will own performance across core kernel subsystems — memory management, scheduling, IPC, and synchronization — analysing behaviour on real silicon down to the microarchitectural level and landing production-shippable optimizations that improve responsiveness, throughput, and battery life. This is a hands-on role for an engineer who is at home in allocator internals, scheduler hot paths, and lock-contention traces, working alongside CPU microarchitects, runtime engineers, and AI-driven optimization tooling.

Key Responsibilities:

• Optimize memory management internals: buddy allocator, slab/SLUB, page reclaim and LRU/MGLRU, memory compaction and defragmentation, transparent huge pages, page-fault and TLB-shootdown paths, copy-on-write behaviour

• Drive scheduler performance: run-queue and load-balancing behaviour, energy-aware scheduling, wakeup latency, task placement on heterogeneous (big.LITTLE/DynamIQ) topologies, cpufreq/cpuidle governor interaction

• Optimize synchronization primitives and lock-heavy paths: futex fast/slow paths, mutexes and rwsems, spinlocks/qspinlocks, RCU, seqlocks, per-CPU data, memory ordering and barriers on ARM64

• Analyse and improve IPC and syscall paths: context-switch cost, binder-style IPC, shared memory, vDSO, interrupt/softirq handling

• Identify bottlenecks on flagship mobile workloads (gaming, day-of-use, camera, AI inference) using PMU counters, ftrace/perf, eBPF, lockdep/lockstat, and power measurement with mA/mAh attribution

• Land production-quality kernel patches from hypothesis through benchmarking to ship, with measured latency and energy impact

• Collaborate with CPU microarchitects on HW-SW co-design: exploit microarchitectural features in the kernel and shape future hardware through kernel-driven requirements

• Contribute to AI-assisted kernel optimization pipelines (automated analyze → patch → benchmark → validate loops)
  

This job description is only an outline of the tasks, responsibilities and outcomes required of the role. The jobholder will carry out any other duties as may be reasonably required by his/her line manager. The job description and personal specification may be reviewed on an ongoing basis in accordance with the changing needs of Huawei Research and Development UK Limited.

Person Specification:

Required:

• 10+ years of OS kernel development in C (Linux or comparable), with patches shipped to production systems at scale

• Expert-level understanding of MM internals: physical/virtual memory management, buddy and slab allocation, reclaim, compaction, page tables, TLB management

• Deep scheduler knowledge: CFS/EEVDF internals, load balancing, preemption, real-time classes, energy-aware scheduling

• Mastery of kernel synchronization: locking primitives, RCU, lock-free techniques, the ARM64 memory model and barrier semantics

• Proven kernel performance-analysis skills: PMU counters, ftrace/perf, eBPF, lock contention and latency analysis

• Strong ARM64 architecture grounding: exception levels, cache hierarchy and maintenance, TLBs, memory ordering

Desired:

• Mobile power engineering: DVFS governors, cpuidle, per-workload energy attribution

• Upstream Linux kernel contributions (mm, sched, locking, or related subsystems)

• Familiarity with HarmonyOS or Android common kernel

• Exposure to CPU microarchitecture and cycle-accurate modelling (gem5)

• Experience with LLM/agentic tooling applied to systems software

What we offer 

• 33 days annual leave entitlement per year (including UK public holidays)

• Group Personal Pension

• Life insurance

• Private medical insurance

• Medical expense claim scheme

• Employee Assistance Program

• Cycle to work scheme

• Company sports club and social events

• Additional time off for learning and development