Platform SW/FW Engineer, Advanced

At Zebra, we are a community of innovators who come together to create new ways of working. United by curiosity and a culture of caring, we develop smart solutions that anticipate our customer’s and partner’s needs and solve their challenges. Being part of Zebra Nation means you are seen, heard, valued, and respected. Drawing from our unique perspectives, we collaborate to deliver on our purpose. Here you are part of a team pushing boundaries today to redefine the work of tomorrow for organizations, their employees, and those they serve.   You’ll have opportunities to learn and lead in a forward-thinking environment, defining your path to a fulfilling career while channeling your skills toward causes you care about—locally and globally. Come make an impact every day at Zebra.

We are seeking a visionary Advanced SW/FW Platform Engineer (Level 4) to define the technical direction and system architecture of our intelligent, edge-based smart cameras. You will act as the principal architect for platform bring-up, system services, and NPU acceleration. We are looking for a system-level strategist with a powerful creator instinct. You understand that writing code is just a means to an end; as such, you will lead by example in utilizing agentic AI tools to automate implementation, focusing your elite engineering talents on high-level architecture, hardware/software co-design, and solving the toughest system-level challenges. What We Do: We design and build intelligent, edge-based smart cameras featuring on-board Neural Processing Units (NPUs) that run hardware-accelerated image processing and vision algorithms. Your Role & Responsibilities: Technical Leadership: Set the architectural vision for our Linux-based smart camera platforms and design highly robust, secure platform management services in modern C++. System Bring-up Strategy: Lead complex platform bring-up initiatives, defining custom Yocto layers and BSP architectures that seamlessly tie hardware to software. Advanced NPU Orchestration: Architect the infrastructure that integrates on-board NPUs for real-time, hardware-accelerated image and video processing. Process Innovation: Champion and pioneer the adoption of agentic AI coding methodologies within the engineering organization, dramatically scaling team output and code quality. Cross-Functional Debugging: Act as the ultimate technical escalation point, diving into deep hardware/software boundary anomalies using schematics, logic analyzers, debug probes, and oscilloscopes. Core Requirements: Mastery of Linux Internals: Deep, low-level expertise in the Linux kernel, bootloaders, system-level management, custom systemd service orchestration, and resource optimization. Architectural C++ Command: Extensive experience designing high-performance, concurrent, and modular systems using modern C++. Strategic Problem Solver: A distinguished track record of solving multi-layered system and hardware integration challenges under tight performance constraints. Creator Instinct: A self-driven builder who is passionate about setting new engineering standards and mentoring senior team members. Desirable Bonuses (Nice-to-Have): Direct experience architecting pipelines for NPUs, GPUs, or DSPs, particularly for image processing or computer vision at the edge. Deep expertise with the Yocto Project build system (writing complex recipes, managing layers, and customizing distributions). Strong Electrical Engineering (EE) background, capable of contributing to hardware design reviews and performing deep hardware-level debugging. Incentive Compensation: In addition to base pay, Zebra offers this role the opportunity to earn a performance-based annual cash incentive, at a target equal to 12% of base pay, in accordance with the terms of the applicable incentive plan. Job Posting Statement: To protect candidates from falling victim to online fraudulent activity involving fake job