11 hours ago
Base Salary
$211k - $254k/yr
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for kernel projects, own them from problem definition through fleet rollout, and mentor engineers.
- Enable new servers, CPUs, and NICs, including drivers, IRQ affinity, RSS, and queue layouts on high-core-count hosts.
- Improve datapath and transport performance using XDP, eBPF, and protocol work based on IETF specifications.
- Debug cross-layer issues involving MTU behavior, cgroup memory accounting, and packet filtering.
- Develop and maintain Linux kernel changes and Fastly kernel modules while reducing the private delta through upstreaming.
- Ensure control-plane state delivered to eBPF and XDP programs is applied, verified, and safely reversible.
- Triage production crashes, WARNs, and regressions across the fleet, identify root causes, and deliver fixes.
- Own the kernel release process, including CI, bake, canary, staged rollout, rollback, crash metrics, and drift detection.
- Participate in on-call rotations, lead kernel incident response, and drive follow-up actions to completion.
Requirements
- 7+ years of related engineering experience, including substantial production C experience.
- At least 3 years leading technical projects.
- Production Linux kernel development experience, including debugging use-after-free, refcount, and memory leak bugs with KASAN, kdump, ftrace, perf, or bpftrace.
- Working knowledge of the Linux scheduler and memory management, including EEVDF and memcg.
- Experience managing a kernel patch stack and working with upstream communities.
- Strong understanding of the Linux network stack, including TCP/IP, sk_buff lifecycle, qdiscs, and NIC drivers, with deep expertise in networking or XDP/eBPF.
- Operational experience with staged rollouts, canaries, kill switches, observability, postmortems, and action-item closure.
- Understanding of distributed systems, control-plane and datapath consistency, partial failure, and safe fleet-scale configuration rollout.
- Ability to design broadly scoped work and drive it across teams.
- Preferred experience includes upstream kernel contributions, subsystem maintainership, QUIC, TCP, ECN, L4S, MASQUE, AMD EPYC or Intel platforms, mlx5, ice or i40e NIC drivers, load balancing, traffic steering, CDN or large edge networks, and container networking.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance beginning on the first day of employment.
- Family planning support, mental health support, and an Employee Assistance Program.
- Life, disability, and accident insurance.
- Flexible vacation policy and up to 18 days of accrued paid sick leave.
- 401(k) with company match and an Employee Stock Purchase Program.
- For 2026, 11 paid local holidays and 12 paid company wellness days.
- Remote and hybrid work options are available in the United States, with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Denver.
- Core business-hours availability, participation in an on-call rotation, and potential role-related travel are required.
About Fastly
Fastly builds an edge cloud platform for developers and enterprises to deliver and secure web and streaming applications, including CDN, programmable edge compute, load balancing, and security products such as a next‑gen WAF, DDoS protection, and bot management. It sells usage‑based and subscription services to digital businesses; founded in 2011, headquartered in San Francisco, and publicly traded on the NYSE, with customers such as GitHub and The New York Times.