OK, yep I get that. Excuse my cynicism. True, most of us system programmers could describe, in detail, malloc and free from scratch and write a basic malloc from scratch and then know why the basic K&RT whipped up malloc would actually be quite crappy when faced with real world use.

I am looking to transition into this sort of work from a more "general development" sort of background. Any resources you could recommend?

I seriously doubt you and ivalm are having a hard time finding SWEs capable of memory management in C.

Something is terribly wrong with your hiring practices. You just need to admit it's a "you" problem.