Audio Consultant Engineer

Audio Consultant Engineer – Linux Audio Stack

Location: Worldwide (Remote/Anywhere)

Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

Employment Type: Full-time

What You'll Actually Do

• Upstream & Community Participation: Contribute to and collaborate with WirePlumber, PipeWire, and ALSA upstream communities

• Real-World Impact: Design, integrate, and ship embedded Linux audio systems that work reliably in real-world products

• Deep Technical Work: Implement and debug PipeWire + WirePlumber stacks, including ALSA, DSPs, and system-level interactions

• Customer Collaboration: Work directly with customer teams to translate requirements into robust audio architectures and solutions

• Breadth When Needed: Support adjacent areas like Bluetooth audio and Linux audio tooling when required (pw-cli, pw-top, alsa-utils, tracing frameworks) to diagnose and resolve issues efficiently

• Be a Technical Advisor: Explain complex audio architecture decisions to product teams, provide honest assessments of what is and isn't possible and build trust through transparent communication

What We're Looking For

Required:

• Strong hands-on experience with the Linux audio stack (PipeWire, WirePlumber, ALSA)

• Strong proficiency in C and systems-level programming

• Solid understanding of core audio concepts (latency, formats, synchronization, buffering, resampling)

• Proven ability to debug complex issues across multiple layers of a Linux system

• Comfortable working directly with customers in a consulting or support capacity

• Strong communication skills, both written and verbal

Nice to Have:

• Experience with ALSA kernel driver development

• Familiarity with Rust

• Exposure to Bluetooth audio (A2DP, HFP, LE Audio)

• Basic understanding of DSP concepts, such as signal flow, filtering, and common processing blocks (e.g. echo cancellation, noise suppression, beamforming)

• Contributions to relevant open-source projects

• Experience with embedded or real-time Linux systems

What We Offer

Compensation & Benefits

We offer a competitive benefits package tailored to each country in which we have employees, plus a core global benefit offering accessible to all Collaborans. Our core benefits include:

• Competitive salary based on experience and location

• Office setup budget

• Sabbatical/Retention of Services - after five years of continuous service

• Co-working policy - support for working outside home

• Wellness assessments - biannual wellbeing assessments with a trained mental health specialist

• Conference attendance - we cover expenses and encourage speaking opportunities

• Open source time - contribute to projects you care about

Work Environment

• Fully remote - work where you’re most productive

• Global team - engineers across Europe, Americas and Asia

• No on-call rotations - this isn't support work

• Sustainable pace - we're here for the long term

• Flexible hours - manage your own schedule

Growth & Impact

• Upstream contributions - your work shapes Linux, not just client products

• Technical leadership track - path to principal engineer, subsystem expertise or technical architecture roles

• Consulting track - develop deeper client relationships, lead customer engagements or shape service offerings

• Mentorship opportunities - both receiving and providing guidance

• Conference speaking - we support presentation submissions and provide coaching

• Recognition - your contributions are public, building your professional reputation

Culture & Values

• Upstream first - we believe the best solutions benefit everyone

• Transparency - open discussion about technical decisions, business constraints and project challenges

• Pragmatism - perfect is the enemy of good; we ship quality code that solves real problems

• Respect for expertise - we trust engineers to make technical decisions

• Collaborative - we succeed by working together, internally and with the community

• Sustainable pace - we're here for the marathon, not the sprint