The Platform Software Technical Fellow serves as the senior technical authority for the architecture, evolution, and long-term strategy of the embedded Linux inflight entertainment platform. This role operates as a VP-level individual contributor and is responsible for guiding foundational technical decisions that impact multiple product lines and hardware generations across the organization.
This position provides architectural vision and technical leadership across a distributed engineering environment, driving modernization initiatives that strengthen platform abstractions, improve architectural clarity, and increase technical leverage. The Fellow works directly on complex system-level challenges while shaping long-term platform strategy, design principles, and technical standards to ensure scalability, maintainability, and innovation.
Core Duties
- Shape platform architecture across OS, middleware, and system services, defining patterns and abstractions that enable consistency, reusability, and clarity across multiple product lines and hardware generations
- Guide platform modernization efforts by identifying architectural debt, proposing refactoring strategies, and advancing approaches that reduce fragmentation while maintaining stability in long-lifecycle embedded systems
- Architect integration surfaces including APIs, SDK patterns, and platform contracts that serve both internal teams and external partners, balancing flexibility with consistency and long-term maintainability
- Advance observability and operational clarity at the platform layer, influencing instrumentation strategies, diagnostic capabilities, and approaches that make complex distributed systems understandable and debuggable
- Contribute to architectural decision-making across the organization, collaborating with the Director of Architecture and product groups on frameworks, principles, and trade-offs that affect platform evolution
- Elevate performance and reliability engineering by defining patterns for resource management, failure handling, and validation in resource-constrained environments, informed by deep understanding of embedded Linux systems
- Influence technical standards through architecture reviews, technical writing, proof-of-concepts, and cross-team collaboration, raising the bar for platform design rigor and systems thinking
- Drive platform leverage by identifying common needs across product lines, establishing shared solutions, and creating architectural clarity that enables teams to build on proven foundations
Requirements
- Master's Degree in Engineering or related technical field
- 20+ years of software engineering experience with deep focus on platform architecture, system services, and building foundations that support diverse engineering organizations and use cases
- Broad systems-level expertise spanning OS internals, middleware patterns, service architectures, and API design, with strong understanding of embedded Linux environments and resource-constrained systems
- Proven track record architecting platforms used by multiple teams or external partners, demonstrating ability to balance abstraction with pragmatism and long-term thinking with incremental evolution
- Deep technical judgment for navigating complex architectural trade-offs involving performance, reliability, maintainability, compatibility, and operational complexity in real-world platform contexts
- Experience with platform modernization including strategies for evolving legacy systems, managing technical debt, and introducing new patterns without destabilizing existing functionality
- Collaborative influence across engineering organizations, demonstrated through architectural leadership, cross-functional partnership, and ability to drive consensus on sophisticated technical decisions
- Excellent technical communication skills for documenting architectural patterns, explaining trade-offs, and making complex platform concepts accessible to engineers and partners at all levels
- Experience with embedded systems, consumer electronics, automotive, aerospace, or other domains with long product lifecycles and strict reliability requirements
- Background in platform or middleware products serving external developers, partners, or ecosystems
- Contributions to open-source platform projects, operating systems, or foundational infrastructure
- Experience with multi-product platform strategies and managing platform evolution across hardware generations
Technical Expertise
The ideal candidate brings deep knowledge of platform principles, architectural paradigms, and system design patterns rather than reliance on specific tools or frameworks. Expertise should include:
- Embedded Linux Platform Architecture: Kernel configuration and customization, system services, init systems, device management, resource control, and boot optimization within constrained environments
- Middleware and Service Architecture: Layered system design, inter-process communication (IPC), service discovery, lifecycle management, and modular, composable system patterns
- API and Integration Design: Interface contract development, versioning strategies, backward compatibility management, SDK patterns, and scalable approaches to exposing platform capabilities to diverse consumers
- Performance and Resource Management: Memory optimization, CPU scheduling, I/O performance tuning, power management, and performance validation techniques in embedded systems
- Reliability and Resilience Engineering: Fault isolation, graceful degradation, state management, recovery mechanisms, and predictable system behavior under stress conditions
- Observability and Diagnostics: Instrumentation design, logging frameworks, metrics and telemetry strategies, distributed tracing, and production-level debuggability
- Platform Evolution and Compatibility Strategy: Deprecation planning, breaking change management, feature flagging, and balancing innovation with long-term stability in extended product lifecycles
- Multi-Product Platform Design: Architectural abstraction layers that accommodate hardware variability, configuration management practices, and scalable strategies for sharing platform investments across multiple product lines
Benefits
The starting pay range for this position is $234,000 - 264,000 per year however, base pay offered may vary depending on the level of the position, skills, experience, job-related knowledge, and location.
In addition to a comprehensive package of health benefits that include company contributions, Safran Passenger Innovations offers a variety of additional benefits and perks to enhance your work-life balance experience including but not limited to:
- Discretionary bonus program
- Future financial security with a 401(k) program with company match
- Paid time off covering vacations, personal time off and sick days, capped off by an exciting year-end holiday shutdown
- Embraced flexibility with our alternative work schedule (9/80) to navigate your workweeks with every other Friday off
