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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.
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