Principal SDN Engineer - Cloud Networking & Observability

Owen Thomas B Corp; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA is seeking a Principal Engineer, Software Defined Networking to design, build, and operate scalable SDN solutions for AI Cloud workloads, including GPU-accelerated training and cloud gaming. You’ll own the SDN stack from control to data plane, emphasizing reliability engineering, observability, and incident response.

You will contribute to OVN-Kubernetes upstreams, optimize network observability, and drive secure, multi-tenant networking through CI/CD pipelines and GitOps in a large-scale

Qualifications

• Requires BS/MS in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent
• 15+ years of proven software development experience in large-scale distributed environments
• Expert-level knowledge of OVN, OVS, OpenFlow and modern network protocols
• Strong programming skills in C and Go; scripting in Bash and Python
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes and deploying CNIs (OVN-Kubernetes)
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and deployment tools (Ansible, Terraform, ArgoCD, Flux)
• Experience designing and operating complex multi-stage CI/CD pipelines
• 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

Responsibilities

• Design and develop SDN control and data plane software (OVS/OVN/OpenFlow) for multi-tenant clouds
• Build IaaS network orchestration and services using gRPC/REST to meet security and performance SLAs
• Contribute upstream to OVN-Kubernetes and related projects
• Develop software for network observability including telemetry and monitoring
• Operate OVS-OVN based SDN solutions in large-scale NVIDIA AI Cloud environments
• Own end-to-end observability for the SDN stack with monitoring and tracing
• Design and maintain CI/CD pipelines (GitLab) across Linux host networking, OVS, OVN, and Kubernetes CNIs
• Implement GitOps approaches for secure cloud integration
• Collaborate with SRE/DevOps and network teams on production readiness and tooling

Skills

15+ years experience

OVN/OVS/OpenFlow expertise

C programming

Go programming

Bash/Python scripting

Kubernetes

CNIs (OVN-Kubernetes)

Infrastructure-as-Code tools

CI/CD pipelines

TLS and strong authentication

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Ansible

Terraform

ArgoCD

Flux

OVN-Kubernetes

Job description

NVIDIA is seeking a Principal Engineer, Software Defined Networking to design, build, and operate scalable SDN solutions for AI Cloud workloads, including GPU-accelerated training and cloud gaming. You’ll own the SDN stack from control to data plane, emphasizing reliability engineering, observability, and incident response.

You will contribute to OVN-Kubernetes upstreams, optimize network observability, and drive secure, multi-tenant networking through CI/CD pipelines and GitOps in a large-scale