About the role#
This internship is a 3-month intensive study focused on the practical limits of using automated formal methods to guarantee the safety of concurrent kernel primitives. You will work on transitioning a kernel from a monolithic lock to fine-grained concurrency, an engineering challenge where traditional testing often fails to catch non-deterministic bugs.
What you'll do#
- Formalize locking protocols to mathematically prove the absence of deadlocks and circular waits.
- Apply Bounded Model Checking to C source code to scan for data races, pointer safety, and invariant violations.
- Verify the placement of memory barriers to prevent hardware-level synchronization failure on modern CPUs.
- Use LLMs as an inference engine to synthesize formal invariants and environment harnesses, then audit the results for logical soundness.
What you'll need#
- Currently pursuing or completed a PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related field with relevant research projects and publications.
- Deep proficiency in C, including the ability to reason about memory alignment, volatile keywords, and hardware interrupts.
- A visceral understanding of L1/L2 cache coherency, lock hierarchies, and how C programs behave on weak-memory hardware.
- Ability to model software as a discrete state-machine.
- Persistence when facing state space explosion or cryptic model-checker errors.
Location & details#
- Location: San Jose, California.
- Modality: On-site.
- Schedule: Full-time.
- Compensation: $38.00 - $46.00 per hour, depending on experience and education.
About NIO
NIO designs, develops, and sells premium smart electric vehicles. The company focuses on autonomous driving, electric powertrains, and battery technologies. Founded in 2014, it operates as a public company with headquarters in Jiading, Shanghai. Its workforce includes over 10,000 employees across offices in China, the United States, and Germany.
How to get in at NIO
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