Junior Operating Systems Engineer (Embedded Linux / Yocto) at Lyntris
San Diego, CA
$100,000–$120,000
Jul 11, 2026
San Diego, CA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
An entry-level embedded Linux engineering role focused on building and maintaining custom OS images for defense appliance hardware. Day-to-day work centers on Yocto-based build systems, A/B update architectures, secure boot, OS hardening, and debugging kernel and driver issues on physical hardware. Generative AI tools are expected to be part of the regular workflow. A U.S. national security clearance is required.
Junior level · San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA · Secret clearance · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $166,860 (middle half $131,418–$198,246).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The clearance requirement is stated as 'active U.S. national security clearance' or the ability to obtain one. The posting does not specify a level (Secret, Top Secret, etc.); 'national security clearance' most commonly maps to Secret in defense contexts, so Secret has been used here. Verify the actual required level with the hiring team.
The SOC classification is a genuine judgment call: the role builds and maintains custom OS images (software engineering work — 15-1252) but is also deeply systems/infrastructure-oriented (embedded Linux, kernel/driver debugging — 15-1244). 15-1252 was chosen because the primary deliverable is authored software artifacts (Yocto recipes, layers, build configurations, update tooling).
The Required Qualifications section is an exact duplicate of the Duties and Responsibilities section, which is unusual. All items have been treated as hard gates since they appear under the 'Required Qualifications' heading.
The Preferred Qualifications list Yocto/Buildroot as 'hands-on experience' — this appears to be a softer restatement of the required Yocto skill. Yocto is marked required based on its presence in the Required Qualifications section; the preferred mention is redundant.
No compensation figures are provided beyond a general statement that a pay scale exists; no numeric range was published in this posting.
Suricata and Zeek are listed together as interchangeable examples of network security tooling under Preferred Qualifications and have been combined into one preferred skill with Zeek as an alternative.
Requires a Secret clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
Read the full posting
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