Hacker News Reader

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.

One I came across:

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

mouseover the image

ksplice.com are hardcore low-level hackers.

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.