I might be able to work for a professor who's doing research into
automated bug-finding. It'd probably take 50+ hours of my time. My
main motivation would be getting it on my resume to help with finding
a software engineering job later. Do you think it'd be worth the time
and effort just to be able to say, "I used metacompilation techniques
to automatically fund bugs in the Linux and BSD kernals. I wrote
patches for the bugs we found, and they have now been incorporated
into the Linux and BSD kernals"? I already have a fair amount of
programming job experience, but it's mostly SQL, Javascript, and
scientific research.

Hi gremlin,

Very few employers are going to care about metacompilation techniques.
 Kernel experience is good.  It will probably lend you some wizardly
credibility even if the job doesn't involve that kind of work.  Doing
something you haven't done before is also good.  I believe a lot of
the job market works by keyword matching, so the more keywords you can
wave, the better your chances.

Whether it's worth 50+ hours of your time depends on what else you
could do with the time.  It's probably better to have this credit on
your resume than blank space.

The market seems to be getting increasingly specialized, so it might
help if you set a more specific goal than "software engineer" and
looked for experience related to your goal.  This opportunity you
describe would do a lot more for you with some employers than others.

I think you were looking for an opinion, and this is mine, based on 28
years of experience as a software engineer, manager, and job-seeker. 
If you need any clarification, please ask.

--efn