Software Engineer - Network Core Datapath

Have you ever wondered what happens inside the cloud?

Based in New York, DigitalOcean is a dynamic, high-growth technology company that serves a robust and passionate community of developers, teams, and businesses around the world. We believe that today’s entrepreneurs are changing the world through software. Our mission is to empower these entrepreneurs by bringing modern app development within reach for any developer, anywhere in the world.

We want people who are passionate about solving large scale complex distributed systems challenges.

We are looking for a Software Engineer with expertise in Hypervisor side Networking to build and support existing Network Software, and help to define, deploy, and support new hypervisor network architecture that runs on tens of thousands of hypervisors and bare-metal servers across our global infrastructure network. Reporting to the Engineering Manager: Network Core, the Network Software Engineer will be responsible for building the next generation of software-defined networking on our platform: providing flexible, yet simple, primitives that our customers have come to love.

What you’ll be doing:

• New Design & Architecture of the Digitalocean Hypervisor fleet network datapath
• Operating and maintaining the existing Digitalocean fleet’s datapath, consisting of more than 18,000 hypervisors all running OVS
• Work on both new and existing architecture initiatives to build systems that enable fleet optimization such as optimizing the virtual networking stack to reduce CAPEX / OPEX, and increase our scalability
• Solving complex data flow challenges in support of new products that touch or modify the customer datapath on the HV, or within the datacenter network
• Coming up with innovative ideas to improve performance and scalability in a cloud-scale environment
• Diving deep into the ocean of highly available & fault-tolerant virtual and logical networking
• Debugging/troubleshooting complex production datapath issues across datacenters.
• Participating in a team effort to improve visibility on various network metrics.
• Using technologies and tools such as: Linux, VXLAN, STT, GENEVE, tcpdump, OpenFlow, Open vSwitch, conntrack, iptables, netfilter, ebtables, Linux Bridge, and more!

What we’ll expect from you:

• Expertise with at least two of the following languages: Go, Grpc, Perl, Python, C/C++ (Go is definitely a plus)
• Experience with Chef, Ansible/AWX is a plus
• Observability experience with tooling such as Prometheus and Grafana are a plus
• A solid knowledge of networking and network layers(especially OSI model layer 2 and above).
• As a plus, but not required, understanding of BPF/eBPF, XDP Bpfilter
• Knowledge of SmartNIC and Performance NIC characteristics is a plus
• Understanding of flexible and scalable network architecture.
• Ability to self-organize, take ownership, initiative and clearly communicate intent. Ours is a completely remote team so the ability to communicate effectively in a remote environment is key to being a part of this team.
• Be ready and responsible for taking complex challenges that come up in a fast-paced environment.

Why you’ll likeworking for DigitalOcean:

We value development. You will work with some of the smartest and most interesting people in the industry. We are a high-performance organization that is always challenging ourselves to continuously grow. We maintain a growth mindset in everything we do and invest deeply in employee development through formalized mentorship, LinkedIn Learning, O’Reilly tracks, and other internal programs. We also provide all employees with reimbursement for relevant conferences, training, and education.

We care about your physical, financial and mental well-being. We offer competitive health, dental, and vision benefits for employees and their dependents, a monthly gym reimbursement to support your physical health, and a commute or internet allowance to make your trips to your office or your desk easier. We offer generous parental leave with transition time built-in upon return to work. We offer competitive compensation and a 401k plan with up to a 4% employer match.

We support our remote employee experience. While we have great office spaces in NYC, Cambridge and Palo Alto, we’re very distributed—we use a number of communication tools to connect across the company—and all remote employees have the opportunity to visit our offices and meet their teams face-to-face at team offsites. We also have an annual company offsite, Shark Week, to get quality in-person time with the entire company at least once a year. We also allow employees to outfit their workstations to meet their needs—whether remote or in office.

We value diversity and inclusivity. We are an equal opportunity employer and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.