Role Overview

We are seeking a highly motivated Device Software Lead to join our team in Horw, Switzerland. This is an onsite position, with the flexibility to work from home 1–2 days per week following the initial onboarding period.

As Device Software Lead, you will be the architect and driving force behind how Toradex turns strong hardware and BSP foundations into innovative, easy-to-use, and secure device enablement.

This is a senior technical and people leadership role (Lead / Principal / Director level) that combines:

• Deep Embedded Linux & Yocto expertise
• Line management responsibilities from day one 
• A strong innovation mandate 
• A visible thought leadership and external-facing component

You won’t just run the current playbook - you will evolve and reinvent how Toradex demonstrates industry-leadership in Device Software: from how we structure BSP and layers, to how we deliver reference images, to how customers experience our platform end-to-end.

This role is ideal for leaders who want to combine strategic architectural thinking, hands-on engineering, software product management for devices, and people management – shaping both the technology and the team that delivers it.

You’ll be a key voice in both what we build and how the world hears about it.

You’ll be accountable not only for how the platform is built, but also for which device software capabilities we prioritize, how they are packaged, and how they land with customers.

What You Will Do

Lead and Innovate the Device Software Integration Layer

• Architect and implement:

  • You will define the technical vision for our device software stack and personally drive key architectural decisions through to implementation, ensuring technical excellence at every layer.

• Continuously innovate how this stack is put together:

  • New layering patterns that keep BSP clean but powerful 

  • Smarter reuse of product building blocks to cover more use cases with less complexity 

  • Simplify advanced software features for the ease-of-use of the customer

• Define and maintain clear, future-proof boundaries across BSP, meta-layers and distros so we can move fast without creating chaos.

Drive Cross-Team Technical Strategy & Change

• Act as the technical counterpart and sparring partner for leaders in:

  • BSP / kernel

  • Security

  • Automation / CI

  • Product management Devices

  • Product Management Torizon OS

  • Torizon R&D Director

• Shape and champion medium- and long-term technical bets, such as:

  • How we meet evolving security and regulatory demands

  • How we structure releases and long-term maintenance

  • How our device software strategy ties into Torizon and other offerings

• Turn strategy into concrete change:

  • Roadmaps

  • Design decisions

  • Technical guidelines others can follow

 Lead, Grow, and Inspire a High-Impact Team

• Be line manager from day one for the Device Software team:

  • Set a clear vision and direction

  • Provide coaching, feedback, and growth opportunities

  • Build a culture where innovation and shipping both matter

• Help attract and hire talented engineers who are excited by platform building and innovation.

Turn “Possible” into “Easy” – with New Ideas

• Own the vision for simplicity for the customer enablement on Toradex devices:

  • Secure boot and encryption that are safe, robust, and simple to adopt

  • Connectivity enablement where Wi‑Fi / BT / 4G/5G are not a project, but a capability

  • Reference images that are genuinely useful: easy to start from, easy to adapt for production

• Rethink and improve how developers experience our platform:

  • From first download, to first boot, to first secure, connected product

  • From Yocto experts to teams new to Embedded Linux

• Make sure innovation is visible and usable:

  • Back technical work with strong documentation, examples, and developer workflows.

Thought Leadership, Innovation & External Messaging

• Act as a thought leader for Toradex in the embedded software community:

  • Speak at conferences and webinars

  • Publish deep technical articles and architecture stories

  • Engage with partners and strategic customers on platform direction

• Bring outside-in thinking:

  • Track industry trends (e.g. security, regulatory, RT, connectivity, open-source tooling)

  • Distill what really matters for Toradex and our customers

  • Propose and drive new initiatives that keep us ahead of the curve

• Help shape a clear external narrative:

  • How Toradex makes Embedded Linux & Yocto easier

  • Why our approach to BSPs, layers, and enablement is different and better

  • How innovation in device software translates into real customer value

What We Are Looking For

Technical Background

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in Embedded Linux on ARM-based systems.

• Strong, practical experience with Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded, including:

  • Designing and maintaining layers and recipes

  • Working with BSPs or Yocto-based distributions

  • Owning or significantly influencing platform-level architecture

• Very good understanding of:

  • Linux kernel configuration for embedded

  • Device trees and driver integration

  • Bootloaders (e.g. U‑Boot) and secure boot basics

• Experience in at least one of:

  • Security enablement (secure boot, encryption, key provisioning)

  • Connectivity enablement (Wi‑Fi / cellular integration, network stack configuration)

  • Platform / distribution integration in embedded products

• Remain deeply hands-on:

  • You will regularly design, prototype, and review code, and are expected to directly contribute to critical technical solutions—not just oversee or delegate.

  • You thrive on solving complex integration challenges and are comfortable jumping into the codebase when needed.

Leadership, Communication & Innovation

• Experience owning a roadmap or product area (not just delivering tickets), ideally for developer platforms, SDKs, or embedded device software.

• Comfortable working with product managers and customers to frame problems, define value, and trade off scope vs. time-to-market.

• Proven experience as a technical lead, principal engineer, architect, or engineering manager, ideally with:

  • Responsibility for platform-level or integration-level topics

  • Leading change and introducing new approaches, not just maintaining the status quo

• Line management or strong mentoring experience; you enjoy helping people grow.

• Outstanding communication skills:

  • Can explain complex technical decisions clearly to engineers and non-engineers

  • Can represent Toradex confidently in public forums

• Demonstrated innovation mindset:

  • You have introduced new ideas, patterns, or tools that significantly improved a platform, workflow, or product

  • You balance bold ideas with a realistic sense of what teams can maintain over time

Personal Qualities

• Customer- and developer-focused: you care deeply about how others experience the platform you build.

• Curious and forward-thinking: you like to explore what’s next and translate it into practical improvements.

• High ownership: you think in terms of outcomes and impact, not tickets.

• People person: approachable, empathetic, and able to create an environment where people feel safe to experiment and speak up.

Nice-to-Have Experience

• Experience in industries with long-lived, high-reliability devices (automotive, medical, industrial, etc.).
• Background at embedded Linux integrators / consultancies, or Linux platform vendors.
• Contributions to open-source projects or communities.
• Experience defining or improving CI/testing strategies for embedded platforms.

What Makes This Role Unique

• You will split your time between hands-on technical work, software product management for devices, architectural leadership, and team development.

• We expect you to lead from the front: designing, building, and mentoring—not just managing or advising.

What We Offer

• A senior, high-impact role where your ideas and leadership will shape how thousands of products are built on Toradex.
• The chance to combine deep engineering, people leadership, and innovation in one role.
• A hybrid workplace offering the flexibility of 1–2 days working from home each week, within a global, diverse engineering organization.
• A culture that values technical excellence, integrity, collaboration, and curiosity.
• Opportunities for external visibility and genuine thought leadership in Embedded Linux & Yocto.

About the role
We are looking for a Principal Engineer with experience in the design and operations of multi-channel white-labeled platforms.  In this role you will lead the design and evolution of our platform to support the needs of both on-prem and hosted customers. Your influence will span across teams, projects and locations, shaping both our technical direction as well as how our teams build and operate software systems.

You will be responsible for defining frontend architecture standards, guiding engineering teams, and ensuring that user-facing platforms are robust, maintainable, secure, and future-proof. You will work closely with product management, UX, backend architects, and delivery teams to translate business and user needs into elegant technical solutions.

You will proactively identify the problems to solve and advocate for the right organization priorities. This role is inherently cross-functional and you will work closely with engineering, product, risk, compliance, data, legal, and executive teams to define and execute on technical strategy. You’ll face and solve a wide range of challenges: technical, product, and operational, shaping your personal growth and career along the way.

This is a senior, hands-on architecture role combining strategic design responsibility with deep technical execution.

What you'll do 

• Define and evolve the frontend architecture across web and mobile (web-based) platforms.
• Collaborate with other engineering leaders in the evolution of the digital platform architecture.
• Build that deliver engineering efficiency and standardization of non-functional requirements
• Be a technical advisor to the Director of Engineering, weighing in on a variety of topics concerning the evolution of our platform.
• Build as an exemplary practitioner: you will get to be hands-on developing software, and set a high quality standard for teams to follow.
• Define the right boundaries, APIs, and integrations between our teams and with our clients and partners to set us up for technical and business success.
• Experience operating, supporting and running software in production environments
• Experience architecting the distribution of SDKs, libraries and components to other engineering teams.
• Solve complex engineering problems endemic to high-availability, low-latency, scalable distributed systems.
• Execute large-scale projects, leading design, planning, and execution across multiple teams to drive technical directions and product outcomes.
• Proactively identify broader problems and opportunities. Anticipate and design the next generation of our systems and products.
• Raise the quality of our engineering teams: you will identify opportunities and advocate for improvements to the way we write software, our approach testing and quality, and shape the habits and processes of highly effective teams.
• Mentor and coach to individuals and teams across the company. Steward engineering communities, fostering design collaboration and mindshare.
• Articulate how technical architecture and team structure interact, provide input to the right organization structure to deliver on our engineer goals.
• Strategic advisor to leadership, representing technical strategy to business and executive stakeholders, and participating in strategic planning.
• Continuously drives improvement, new practices and operational excellence initiatives across the department (e.g. multiple groups). 
• Raises the quality of department and products. Be able to stand up processes, mechanisms, or tools to improve engineering excellence, operations, and quality of our technology.
• Take initiative and produce timely results in a fast-paced and sometimes ambiguous environment.

What you'll need

• 10+ years programming experience, mastery of software development independent of language
• Advanced expertise in designing frontend platforms including mobile, web, SDKs and micro-frontends
• Advanced expertise in designing, building, and operating large-scale fault-tolerant distributed systems, applications, databases, and workflows.
• Ability to effectively translate product and UX concepts into scalable technical solutions.
• Demonstrated experience with continuous delivery principles and techniques: you’ve built systems with layered test automation that is always safe for automated releases to production, enabling a great, low-cycle time developer experience.
• A high standard for what “great” looks like, and experience continuously improving legacy systems to reach it.
• Strong judgment, experience recognizing and driving out critical decisions in a balanced and pragmatic way.
• Experience building systems with public cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, Spanish a plus.
• Ability to lead and influence technical direction across multiple teams.
• Experience working in teams distributed across time zones and willingness to adapt working hours at times.

Technology requirements

• Deep experience in ReactJS 
• Experience with Java and NodeJS
• Strong understanding of web technologies and standards:
  
  
• Browser internals and performance optimization
• Security best practices (XSS, CSRF, auth flows, secure storage, etc.)
• API integration (REST, GraphQL)
• JavaScript / TypeScript
• HTML5, CSS3, responsive design
• Modern build and tooling ecosystems (Webpack, Vite, npm/yarn/pnpm, etc.) 
• Mobile native/hybrid development (ReactNative, Cordova, Swift, Kotlin, Kotlin Multiplatform) 

What Is The Role:

As part of the Platform Engineering department, the Traffic team is crafting, building, and improving the multi-cloud platform at scale for Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless. We grow and mature our distributed network services and solutions for multiple cloud service provider platforms. We are built on Kubernetes, Go/Scala, and custom orchestration architectures. In your daily life with us, you will participate in coding, innovating technical designs, crafting solutions, improving resilience, and prioritizing security, bug fixes, and features. For example, Debugging Azure Networking for Elastic Cloud Serverless is part of our efforts, and we want your experience to contribute to a truly exceptional customer experience!

What You Will Be Doing:

• Taking an engineering approach in leading technical initiatives for automating network engineering efforts to guarantee the reliability of the global Elastic infrastructure. .
• Growing our global Platform infrastructure to meet the increasing scaling demands by developing and maintaining software, codebases, tooling and automations.
• Collaborating in an environment with an inclusive approach, and focusing on operational perfection which uplifts others.
• Preventing repeated customer impact in response to major incidents and prioritised problem management. Our on call rotation is spread well, and we address complex customer concerns too.

What You Bring:

• 10+ years in Software Engineering with product success in delivering Cloud network solutions. You collaborate with engineers as an authority in identifying, implementing and delivering solutions. Experience in public cloud, Go and managed Kubernetes services is advantageous.
• Success and lessons of experiences from striving for 'progress not perfection' in the name of Platform reliability. We want to hear about your customer first approach in solving operational problems for both today and the future.
• Passion for developing solutions that involve inclusive communication methods to grow and strengthen partner and team relationships. Examples of working in distributed teams or working remotely is desirable.

Bonus Points:

You don't need to have all of these items, but these represent the types of work you will do as a Software Engineer at Elastic.

• You have designed and built a SaaS product in a public cloud ideally built using Infrastructure-as-Code tooling such as Crossplane or Terraform
• You have built Kubernetes-at-scale infrastructure, ideally across multiple cloud providers, and the vital automation to support it.
• You have written product features or functions in Golang or other programming languages.
• You have worked with containerized services (such as Docker.)
• You have proven results in leading and improving cross-team engineering initiatives.
• You have experience in system administration with professional skills in Linux on distributed systems at scale.
• You have diagnosed or designed, implemented and created solutions with the Elastic Stack.
• You are experienced in a self-organizing and sharing in a globally distributed team environment.
• You strengthen team members in bringing out the best of each other by uplifting others with coaching and mentoring.