While you're probably going to have more luck in the more hardware-oriented places, that's not to say there are no OS/firmware jobs elsewhere - I got a job stra

While you're probably going to have more luck in the more hardware-oriented places, that's not to say there are no OS/firmware jobs elsewhere - I got a job straight out of my CS degree working on Linux at IBM in Canberra, of all places. I didn't do any work on the Linux kernel (outside of doing a single OS class) while I was studying, but certainly if you're able to contribute to a low-level open source project it's definitely not a bad thing.