Principal Engineer, Software Defined Networking

NVIDIA; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA Corporation is seeking a Principal System Software Engineer, Software Defined Networking, to design, build, and operate scalable SDN solutions for AI clouds hosting GPU-accelerated workloads.

You will own the full SDN stack lifecycle—from control and data plane software design to production reliability, observability, and incident response, collaborating with SRE, DevOps, and network teams to ensure SLAs are met in large-scale cloud environments.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent blend of education and experience.
• 15+ years of software development in large-scale distributed environments.
• Expert-level knowledge of OVN, OVS, OpenFlow and modern network protocols.
• Strong programming in C and Go; Bash and Python scripting.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop multi-tenant cloud SDN control and data plane software (OVS/OVN/OpenFlow).
• Build Infrastructure-as-a-Service virtual network orchestration using gRPC and REST for tenant workloads.
• Drive upstream contributions to OVN-Kubernetes and related open-source projects.
• Develop software for network observability — monitoring, telemetry, and performance analysis.
• Operate and support OVS-OVN based SDN solutions in NVIDIA AI Cloud environments.
• Own end-to-end observability for the SDN stack — monitoring, alerts, tracing, dashboards.
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines (GitLab) across Linux host networking, OVS, OVN, and Kubernetes CNIs.
• Implement GitOps approaches for secure, seamless integration with cloud infrastructure.
• Collaborate with SRE, DevOps, and network engineering teams on production readiness.

Job description

We are looking for a Principal System Software Engineer, Software Defined Networking to design, build, and operate highly performant and scalable SDN solutions for NVIDIA's AI Clouds hosting GPU-accelerated workloads — including hyperscale multi-node training, inference, cloud gaming, and cloud functions. This role spans the full lifecycle of our SDN stack — from designing and developing new control and data plane software to ensuring operational excellence in production through reliability engineering, CI/CD, observability, and incident response.

What you'll be doing:

• Design and develop next‑generation multi‑tenant cloud SDN control and data plane software (OVS, OVN, OpenFlow)
• Build Infrastructure‑as‑a‑Service virtual network orchestration and services using gRPC and REST to support tenant workload security and performance SLAs for BMaaS, VMaaS, and Kubernetes
• Drive upstream contributions to OVN‑Kubernetes and related open‑source projects
• Develop software for network observability — monitoring, telemetry, intelligent metering, and performance analysis
• Operate and support OVS-OVN based SDN solutions in large‑scale NVIDIA AI Cloud environments
• Own end‑to‑end observability for the SDN stack — build and maintain monitoring, alerting, distributed tracing, and dashboarding to ensure real‑time insight into network health, performance, and tenant SLAs
• Design, enhance, and maintain CI/CD pipelines (GitLab) across Linux host networking, OVS, OVN, and Kubernetes CNIs
• Implement GitOps approaches or related experience for secure, seamless integration with cloud infrastructure
• Collaborate with SRE, DevOps, and network engineering teams on production readiness and operational tooling

What we need to see:

• BS/MS in Computer Science or related technical field, or a comparable blend of education and relevant experience
• 15+ years of proven experience in software development for large‑scale distributed environments
• Expert‑level knowledge of OVN, OVS, OpenFlow, and modern network protocols
• Strong programming skills in C and Go; advanced scripting in Bash and Python
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, practical experience deploying and supporting CNIs (OVN‑Kubernetes)
• Hands‑on experience with Infrastructure‑as‑Code and deployment tools (Ansible, Terraform, ArgoCD, Flux)
• Experience designing and operating complex, multi‑stage CI/CD pipelines
• Hands‑on experience developing secure, high‑performance services using gRPC and REST with TLS and strong authentication
• Strong knowledge of datacenter routing, switching, and Linux host/VM networking

Ways to stand out from the crowd:

• Contributions to open‑source projects (especially OVS, OVN, OVS‑Kubernetes, or other Kubernetes networking projects)
• Experience with hardware acceleration (GPU, DPU or equivalent experience) for networking
• Practical experience with major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and hybrid/multi‑cloud deployments
• SRE/DevOps top‑level expertise — on‑call, incident management, operations focused on service reliability targets, production ownership
• Experience with observability platforms and tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, ELK)

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