Staff Engineer, Kernel Networking

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About the team and the role:

The Traffic team is responsible for the reliability, performance, and security of network traffic across our edge and core infrastructure. We design and operate high-throughput, low-latency data paths, evolve our kernel and userspace networking stack, and build observability that powers real-time insight and rapid incident response. Our work spans L4/L7 load balancing, service mesh/data plane, packet processing, congestion control, routing, and traffic policy enforcement.

We are seeking an experienced engineer (10+ years) with deep expertise in the Linux kernel networking stack and production observability to lead design and implementation of high-performance data planes and visibility tooling. You will own system-critical components, influence architecture across teams, and mentor engineers while delivering measurable improvements to throughput, latency, and reliability.

What you will accomplish:

• Design, implement, and optimize kernel-level networking components (TCP/UDP, QUIC, congestion control, sockets, netfilter, XDP/AF_XDP, eBPF) for high-scale production environments

• Build and evolve data planes for L4/L7 traffic management, including load balancers, proxies, NAT, firewalling, rate limiting, and traffic shaping

• Develop robust observability for the networking stack: eBPF-based telemetry, tracing, packet capture, flow logs, performance counters, and SLO/SLA instrumentation

• Lead initiatives to reduce tail latency, improve throughput, and decrease resource utilization via kernel/userspace tuning, scheduling, NUMA/IRQ affinity, offloads, and memory management

• Architect and deploy scalable traffic systems across multi-region, multi-tenant environments with zero-downtime rollouts and rapid incident recovery

• Partner with SRE, Security, and Platform teams on traffic policy, DDoS mitigation, TLS/PKI, and compliance requirements

• Drive roadmap, technical strategy, and cross-functional execution; provide technical leadership and mentorship to the team

• Conduct rigorous benchmarking and capacity planning; define performance baselines and regression gates

• Own production health: participate in on-call rotations, root-cause analysis, and corrective action plans

What you will bring:

• 10+ years of software engineering, with significant experience in Linux kernel networking and high-performance systems.

• Expert-level knowledge of kernel networking subsystems: sockets, TCP/IP stack, routing, netfilter/iptables/nftables, XDP/AF_XDP, eBPF.

• Strong systems programming skills in C/C++ and familiarity with Rust or Go for userspace components.

• Proven experience building and operating large-scale traffic systems (load balancers, proxies, packet processors) in production.

• Hands-on expertise with observability: metrics, logs, tracing, eBPF probes, perf/tracepoints, tcpdump, pcaps, and performance analysis tools.

• Deep understanding of performance tuning: NIC offloads, DPDK or kernel-bypass techniques, IRQ/queue management, NUMA, memory allocators, lock contention, and scheduler behavior.

• Solid knowledge of L4/L7 protocols (TCP, QUIC, TLS, HTTP/2/3), congestion control, and transport/security internals.

• Experience with cloud or bare-metal environments, container orchestration (Kubernetes), service discovery, and service mesh patterns.

• Strong debugging skills across kernel/userspace boundaries; ability to analyze crashes, deadlocks, and performance pathologies.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Contributions to Linux kernel, eBPF tools, or relevant open source projects (Cilium, Envoy, NGINX, HAProxy, Calico, DPDK).

• Experience with programmable data planes, SRv6, BGP/ECMP, anycast, and multi-cluster traffic routing.

• Background in security for networking stacks: firewalling, ACLs, mTLS, DDoS detection/mitigation, bot defense.

• Experience building self-service traffic platforms and developer-facing APIs/SDKs.

• Knowledge of hardware acceleration: SmartNICs, ASICs, FPGA-based offload, and NIC telemetry.

• Experience with time synchronization and precision timing (PTP), clocking, and its impact on networking performance.

#LI-Hybrid

The base pay range for this position is expected in the range below:

$190,400 - $254,200

Base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including location, skills, and experience. The total compensation package for this position may also include other elements, including a target bonus and restricted stock units (as applicable) in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits (including 401(k) eligibility and various paid time off benefits, such as PTO and parental leave). Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment.

If hired, employees will be in an “at-will position” and the Company reserves the right to modify base salary (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.

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