Network Software Engineer

Blaxel•San Francisco, CA

48d

About The Position

We're looking for a world-class Network Software Engineer to architect and build the networking foundation of the first AI-native cloud. You’ll design and implement the full virtual networking stack for Blaxel’s VPC—our next-generation SDN fabric optimized for agentic AI workloads. Your work will span ultra-high-performance dataplane systems (VPP, DPDK, eBPF) and the distributed control-plane and traffic services written in Rust and Go. You’ll also expand our globally distributed networking suite—including our Rust-based load balancer, Rust HTTP proxies, traffic routing systems, and data plane components that already process 1.5M+ requests daily. Your mission: build a VPC that surpasses traditional clouds by an order of magnitude in throughput, latency, visibility, and security enforcement. If you’re a systems-focused engineer who loves Rust, Go, networking internals, and building cloud primitives from scratch, this role is for you.

Requirements

3+ years in systems engineering, distributed systems, networking, or infrastructure software roles
Strong proficiency in Rust, Go, or both (with willingness to work in both)
Experience with SDN or cloud networking systems (VPCs, virtual routers, SDN controllers, overlay networks)
Strong understanding of IPv6, routing (BGP/ECMP), and common overlay technologies (e.g., VXLAN/Geneve)
Hands-on experience with DPDK, VPP, eBPF, or XDP
Strong debugging skills across distributed systems and multi-layer networking

Nice To Haves

Experience building high-performance proxies, L4/L7 load balancers, or edge networking components
Experience building or operating multi-tenant cloud networking systems
Familiarity with distributed systems fundamentals (consensus, sharding, leader election, etc.)
Experience with traffic engineering or global traffic routing
Security background in network isolation, segmentation, or zero-trust architectures
Experience with any of the following is a plus: Kernel bypass / SmartNIC / SR-IOV / RDMA
Custom BPF programs for observability or dataplane filtering
Large-scale IPv6-only environments
Advanced traffic simulation or network modeling
Ultra-low-latency performance tuning
Cloud provider networking (AWS VPC, GCP VPC, Azure VNet internals)

Responsibilities

You’ll collaborate closely with founders and infrastructure teams to design, build, and operate Blaxel’s end-to-end SDN stack.
Architect and implement the high-performance dataplane for Blaxel’s VPC using VPP, DPDK, eBPF, XDP, and Rust.
Build and extend distributed control-plane systems in Go and Rust: IPAM, L2/L3 routing, topology services, ACL engines, NAT, VPC abstractions.
Develop Rust microservices running at extreme performance envelopes—sub-millisecond latency, multi-million flow tables, multi-Gbps throughput.
Extend our Rust load balancer and Rust HTTP proxies to support worldwide deployment and growing request volumes.
Operate networking workloads on bare-metal clusters with large-scale IPv6-only addressing.
Build testing, simulation, and benchmarking frameworks for both control-plane and dataplane components.
Instrument networking systems with deep observability: metrics, flows, packet traces, latency profiles.
Debug and resolve complex networking issues across layers L2–L7.
Partner with compute, storage stakeholders to design cross-stack performance and reliability guarantees.
Continuously evolve the networking strategy, introducing new primitives optimized for AI-native traffic patterns.