Senior Software Engineer, Networking

Ditto•Washington, DC

20h•$223,000 - $259,000•Remote

About The Position

Ready to shape the future of mesh networking? Join a team at the forefront of next-generation network technology at Ditto. We're expanding our core network stack and building high-performance solutions in next-generation networking, including routing protocols, end-to-end connectivity, transport mechanisms, and edge platforms for mesh systems. Work remotely, set your own schedule, and solve complex, meaningful problems. At Ditto, we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer with a diverse, global team. We believe that inclusive teams drive innovation, and we’re committed to fostering a workplace that values a wide range of backgrounds, perspectives, and talents.

Requirements

5+ years of professional experience building systems software, with at least 3 years focused on networking, transport protocols, or or routing.
Strong proficiency in Rust or C++, including ownership and borrowing semantics, async runtimes, concurrency primitives, and profiling / optimization techniques.
An understanding of some of key mesh networking topics such as TCP, UDP, and QUIC semantics and tradeoffs, including connection establishment, congestion and flow control, retransmission behavior, MTU/fragmentation, and practical implications for latency, throughput, and reliability in real-world systems.
Exposure to or experience working with networked services and protocols.
Demonstrated ability to debug complex behavior in networked and concurrent systems (race conditions, deadlocks, resource leaks, latency spikes).
Experience designing modular APIs and abstractions that scale across multiple implementations and evolve safely over time.
Clear written and verbal communication skills in a distributed, asynchronous team environment.
A passion to learn new networking technologies, APIs, and approaches to build at the bleeding edge of mesh networking.

Nice To Haves

Experience with mesh networking protocols, routing algorithms, or gossip protocols.
Understanding of mobile platform constraints including background execution models, battery optimization, OS suspension/resume cycles, and their impact on persistent connections.
Experience with Apple Core Bluetooth or Android WiFi Aware APIs.
Experience with Linux networking, sockets, async I/O, or low-level systems programming.
Willingness to travel once per quarter for in-person team gatherings.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and own core components of Ditto’s networking and transport stack, spanning overlay networking (routing, virtual connections, channel lifecycle) and underlying physical transports and protocols (BLE, LAN, Wi-Fi Aware, AWDL, etc.).
Drive the re-architecture of the networking stack toward a more modular, scalable, and high-performance design, establishing clear interfaces and ownership boundaries between transport layers and mesh abstractions.
Debug and systematically improve real-world connectivity issues including data transfer reliability, MTU negotiation, pairing instability, throughput ceilings, and cross-platform data sync behavior.
Build and optimize transport mechanisms with explicit attention to flow control, backpressure, congestion handling, retries, connection lifecycle management, and failure recovery.
Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks across latency, memory footprint, CPU utilization, and tail behavior in highly concurrent, asynchronous systems.
Design protocol state machines, wire formats, and transport abstractions that remain correct under unreliable networks, intermittent connectivity, and constrained environments.
Establish meaningful observability through targeted logging, metrics, and diagnostics to enable rapid production debugging and root-cause analysis.