C and C++ software engineers for systems development

C and C++ systems engineers implement software close to the operating system or hardware, where memory limits and device behavior shape the design.

• Linux systems programming: Develop native services and device interfaces using POSIX APIs. Address inter-process communication and resource ownership.
• Embedded development: Write firmware for microcontrollers or RTOS-based devices. Implement peripheral communication and interrupt handling, then debug timing faults on target hardware.

Engineers can also assess existing platform code before hardware changes or operating-system upgrades.

High-throughput C++ developers investigate services that miss latency targets or saturate available CPU capacity. Profiling with perf or Valgrind identifies expensive code paths before optimization starts.

Work can cover multithreaded processing and network I/O, including contention analysis and buffer management. Engineers use workload benchmarks to evaluate changes to allocation patterns or data structures. For compute-heavy paths, SIMD optimization is an option when measurements justify it. Tests compare throughput and tail latency against a recorded baseline rather than assuming a faster implementation.

C and C++ developers extend native applications and build reusable libraries with explicit ownership rules and stable interfaces. C++17 or C++20 adoption can be scoped around compiler support and compatibility requirements.

• Library and application development: Implement application logic and native SDKs. Maintain CMake builds across Linux and Windows where required.
• Language interoperability: Expose C APIs or connect C++ components to Python through pybind11. Define error handling and object lifetimes at the boundary, with integration tests for calling applications.

Maintenance engineers take responsibility for defects and incremental changes in established C and C++ codebases. Crash investigation uses GDB or core dumps; AddressSanitizer and ThreadSanitizer help locate memory errors and data races.

Specialists add regression tests with GoogleTest or Catch2 and maintain CI checks around affected components. Modernization can include compiler upgrades and replacement of unsafe memory ownership patterns. Changes remain scoped to compatibility constraints, with ABI checks where downstream applications depend on existing binaries.