Description
Ford’s Electric Vehicles, Digital and Design (EVDD) team is charged with delivering the company’s vision of a fully electric transportation future. EVDD is customer-obsessed, entrepreneurial, and data-driven and is dedicated to delivering industry-leading customer experience for electric vehicle buyers and owners.
As a Staff Camera Software Engineer, you will take ownership of a Linux camera/ISP stack centered on the chipset vendor's ISP architecture. Your work will span V4L2 media pipeline implementation, firmware command/response integration, DMA-BUF and GPU-shared memory handling, sensor/CSI bring-up, and production-grade reliability fixes. This is a hands-on development role requiring deep kernel-space debugging, concurrency management, and hardware-software co-design. As a staff-level engineer, you will also serve as a technical leader setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and driving cross-team alignment on the camera/ISP roadmap.
Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain Linux kernel camera and ISP drivers utilizing V4L2, the Media Controller framework, and videobuf2 (vb2).
- Integrate and debug MIPI CSI-2 sensors and image pipelines to ensure optimal routing for preview, video, and Zero Shutter Lag (ZSL) paths.
- Implement and maintain robust firmware interfaces, managing command/response queues, interrupt processing, and work-thread synchronization.
- Manage the buffer lifecycle using MMAP, DMA-BUF import/export, zero-copy mechanisms, and fence signaling to minimize latency.
- Drive power management initiatives, including suspend/resume, runtime PM, and clock/power sequencing robustness for camera hardware subsystems.
- Diagnose and resolve complex kernel-space issues such as race conditions, memory leaks, deadlocks, and frame pipeline regressions.
- Build debug and observability tooling using debugfs, sysfs, ftrace tracepoints, custom counters, and system health metrics.
- Maintain high code quality through rigorous code reviews and technical documentation while collaborating closely with chipset vendors/silicon partners, camera sensor manufacturers, and user-space camera framework teams.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or equivalent combination of relevant education and experience.
- 10+ years of embedded systems experience, with a minimum of 5 years dedicated to Linux kernel driver development.
- Expert-level C programming in kernel space, including memory management, locking primitives (mutexes, spinlocks, RCU), workqueues, and interrupt handling.
- Production-level experience with the Linux media stack (V4L2 ioctls, Media Controller entities, and videobuf2).
- Hands-on experience with MIPI CSI-2 sensor and ISP bring-up.
- Strong knowledge of DMA-BUF, scatter-gather mapping, cache coherency, and kernel debugging tools (GDB, ftrace, lockdep).
- Solid understanding of Linux power management (runtime PM and suspend/resume).
Benefits
- Immediate medical, dental, vision and prescription drug coverage
- Flexible family care days, paid parental leave, new parent ramp-up programs, subsidized back-up child care and more
- Family building benefits including adoption and surrogacy expense reimbursement, fertility treatments, and more
- Vehicle discount program for employees and family members and management leases
- Tuition assistance
- Established and active employee resource groups
- Paid time off for individual and team community service
- A generous schedule of paid holidays, including the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day
- Paid time off and the option to purchase additional vacation time.