A lot of work here is working on vendor provided BSP (which can range from esoteric mix of ancient kernels/bootloaders to top-quality community maintained mainline kernels) to work on your custom board/product.

So Linux kernel config/building/patching?

Linux kernel + bootloaders + firmware

The Linux kernel side is mostly device trees, device drivers and the like.

u-boot is very famous as a bootloader in the embedded space

Firmware for board bring up and devices

It’s the “embedded” part that people struggle with.

I can find systemd script gremlins all the live long day.

I can’t find anyone who can write device drivers for custom peripherals, then hook them to user space utilities in a sane way.

The the hackaday community might be a good place to train/find such people, although the are more focused on non-Linux bare-metal code I expect.

I guess you are aware of the consulting companies in this space? Baylibre and Denx (now NABLA) come to mind. Probably more Linux embedded companies on the FOSSjobs wiki. Looking at people/companies contributing to related areas of the Linux codebase is another option.

https://baylibre.com/ https://nabladev.com/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/Resources#employme...