14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has two job openings available on its web site, both calling for software engineers that know what to tweak to optimize power consumption. Successful applicants will be working with the OS X Power Engineering team.
The “Software Power Engineer” position requires someone for Apple’s OS X Power Engineering team, which “has overall responsibility for all aspects of the power efficiency of OS X and its bundled applications.”
“We are involved in feature definition for new OS releases, making sure the implementation of these features is efficient, promoting ongoing power improvements throughout the system, and making sure the OS works well with new Mac hardware,” reads the job advert.
Successful candidates will work with architectural design, power investigations, and debugging of power issues throughout drivers, kernel, Unix/BSD, graphics and imaging, application frameworks, and even standalone applications like Safari and Mail.
A second job opening (posted more recently but still unfilled) is for “Software Power Infrastructure Engineer.”
Applicants are told that if they succeed they’ll be joining the OS X Power and Performance Engineering Infrastructure team, which designs tools to automate collection of information on power consumption throughout the OS.
“Help drive the future of OS X by finding new and better ways to collect data, effectively stress areas of the system, and add low-overhead logging for diagnosis,” reads the ad.
A more detailed description of the job reveals that “The engineer in this role will be expected to help find new and better ways to gather and process our data on power usage.”
This employee will help create and maintain “tools used to identify and triage power regressions in OS X,” and will also be responsible for “contributing to the automation used to run these tools.”
Key qualifications for both jobs include strong computer skills across the board, from understanding of Linux or Unix OS fundamentals (e.g. memory management, process management) to experience with power and performance issues on resource-constrained consumer devices.