Senior Software Engineer II, Network Datapath
DigitalOcean4 hours ago
Base Salary
$167k - $209k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and optimize high-performance network datapath software for DigitalOcean’s cloud infrastructure.
- Build packet-processing and forwarding systems optimized for throughput, latency, CPU efficiency, scalability, and reliability.
- Develop networking functionality across host systems, the Linux kernel, user space, and hardware-accelerated datapaths.
- Implement routing, packet filtering, encapsulation, tunneling, load balancing, traffic steering, and network virtualization.
- Build datapath observability, telemetry, debugging, benchmarking, and performance-monitoring systems.
- Integrate datapath software with DPUs, SmartNICs, programmable NICs, and other hardware acceleration technologies.
- Investigate production networking issues involving packet drops, latency, throughput degradation, CPU utilization, and unexpected traffic behavior.
- Drive projects from technical design through production deployment and contribute to next-generation network architectures.
- Author RFCs, architecture documents, technical proposals, implementation plans, and technical documentation.
- Participate in design reviews, provide technical guidance, and mentor other engineers.
Requirements
- Strong experience designing and developing production software in C, C++, or Go.
- Strong understanding of networking, packet processing, and Linux-based networking systems.
- Knowledge of TCP/IP, routing, switching, VLANs, VXLAN, BGP, ECMP, NAT, load balancing, and network virtualization.
- Experience debugging and optimizing performance-sensitive, multithreaded, and concurrent systems.
- Understanding of Linux kernel networking internals, network namespaces, sockets, queues, interrupts, and NIC drivers.
- Experience with one or more of DPDK, XDP, eBPF, AF_XDP, or SR-IOV.
- Strong understanding of performance analysis, profiling, benchmarking, and troubleshooting.
- Ability to reason across hardware, operating systems, networking, and applications.
- Ability to independently drive technically complex projects through implementation and production deployment.
- Strong technical writing and communication skills, including experience producing RFCs and architecture or design documents.
- Experience with hardware-accelerated networking, DPUs, SmartNICs, IPUs, programmable NICs, DPU-based networking, or programmable datapaths is highly valuable.
- Understanding of PCIe, DMA, queues, interrupts, RSS, offloads, and NIC hardware architecture is valuable.
- Nice-to-have experience includes cloud or hyperscale networking, Linux kernel networking code, NIC drivers, 400G+ networking, high-performance packet processing, VXLAN/EVPN, programmable switches, performance-analysis tooling, benchmarking infrastructure, and contributions to Linux, DPDK, eBPF, OVS, or other open-source networking projects.
Benefits
- Remote role.
- Competitive benefits that vary by location, including an Employee Assistance Program, local employee meetups, and flexible time off.
- Reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.
- Access to LinkedIn Learning’s 10,000+ courses.
- Potential bonus based on company and individual performance.
- Equity compensation for eligible employees, including equity grants upon hire and participation in an Employee Stock Purchase Program.
About DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean provides cloud infrastructure and platform services for developers, startups, and small to mid-sized businesses, including virtual machines (Droplets), managed Kubernetes and databases, object/block storage, networking, and GPUs for AI workloads. It operates a usage-based, self-service public cloud with APIs, CLI, and a marketplace to deploy and scale applications. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, DigitalOcean is a public company listed on the NYSE.