About Us

Chariot Defense is a defense technology company that designs and manufactures a family of power products for the U.S. military and its allies. We believe that credible deterrence of armed conflict and winning if deterrence fails, requires more than just the best drones, sensors, weapons, electronic warfare systems, and command & control capabilities. Those critical components will require sustained electric power in austere and resource-constrained environments. Moreover, military units must be able to turn off the trucks and generators that generate this power to hide and survive. In other words, power generation must be decoupled from power consumption. Chariot Defense’s products enable exactly this capability, allowing U.S. and allied militaries to be more lethal and survivable. We hope you will join us on this mission.

About the Role

We're looking for an Embedded Linux Engineer to own that software platform from the ground up, taking a bare, custom-built board and getting Linux to boot and run reliably on it, then keeping that stack maintainable as we ship and update units in the field. You’ll be the engineer responsible for embedded platforms are built, deployed, and updated across Amphora and future products. Our team comes from Tesla, Anduril, Apple, Archer, and the U.S. military, and we're already fielded across DoD exercises. This is a high-ownership, hands-on role that sits right at the hardware-software boundary.

Key Responsibilities

Board bring-up: Take freshly fabricated carrier boards from freshly assembled to reliably booting — methodically proving out power, memory, and communication interfaces, hands-on with hardware on the bench.

Bootloader & kernel configuration: Stand up the bootloader and configure the Linux kernel so it correctly recognizes and drives our specific hardware.

Device drivers & device tree: Describe our custom hardware to Linux and integrate the drivers needed to talk to peripherals that aren't found in any standard catalog.

Build & deploy with Nix / NixOS: Own our operating system defined as code — producing reproducible, identical images and building safe update and rollback paths for fielded units.

Networking & system services: Configure on-device networking and the system services our higher-level software depends on.

Reliability & maintainability: Build the platform so it stays robust and serviceable across the product's life, under the conditions a defense product actually faces.

Cross-functional integration: Partner closely with the firmware and hardware teams, sitting at the seam between low-level hardware and the software that runs on top of it.

What We’re Looking For

Top-notch engineering intuition and first principles thinking toward designing complex products that function seamlessly for your customer, taking both an engineering/ technical, and product/ customer approach, to strike the optimal balance.
Able to independently identify critical information or priority gaps and apply effort toward closing those gaps.
Undaunted by imperfect, incomplete or absent datasets or information, and capable of making sound, comprehensive, and swift first-principled decisions to achieve a product end-state that meets and/or exceeds the need of the hour.
Not satisfied by superficial explanations of a problem or “band-aid engineering”; seeks persistently to find the specific root cause through data-driven methods, and resolve failures or recurring issues, so they can be mitigated to prevent future such instances.
Gratified by helping your peers succeed, building a robust team culture, and propagation deep camaraderie amongst your peers; seeks to break down information silos by collaborating rigorously with others to solve problems, share knowledge, and provide input.

Qualifications

Required

BS in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or equivalent demonstrated experience.

3+ years building and shipping embedded Linux on custom hardware.

Proven board bring-up experience, from powered-off to reliably booting.