I wonder if there are any startups out there who hire folks with "kernel developer" mentality/experience. I love dynamism and excitement of startup life but unfortunately it often comes with Ruby/JavaScript, which is fine but I prefer lower-level hacking: hardware interrupts, malloc-free environment, etc. I do believe startups who need such skills exist, they just seem to be quieter for some reason. :-(

Come to Austin Texas! When I lived there I met quite a few folks who were hacking on some cool hardware in their garages: embedded video analytics, signal processing, etc. Maybe its the "extreme proximity" to giant campuses of IBM/Motorola/Dell that favors a certain flavor of startup ecosystem, not sure...

But thing may have changed since then.

Maybe not start-ups but I hear and I've seen postings at many hedge funds and their ilk for those that can do low latency algorithms. They're specifically looking for kernel level developers.

ksplice.com are hardcore low-level hackers.

One I came across:

http://fastsoft.com/kernel-developer/

mouseover the image

Evolution Robotics (which may or may not qualify as a startup depending on your perspective)

Try Vmware and storage kind of startups. Virtualization is huge.