Remote Senior Linux Edge Kernel Engineer

Fastly, Inc.; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 211,000 - 254,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity program

Discretionary bonus

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Fastly, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Linux Edge Kernel to own end‑to‑end kernel problems across a global edge fleet.

You will drive performance improvements, coordinate with application teams, and upstream changes to maintain a robust, scalable kernel path on thousands of servers. You will lead with responsibility for cross‑team design, triage crashes, and shape the kernel release process, including CI, canaries, and canary rollouts.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of related engineering experience, including substantial production C, with 3 of those years leading technical projects.
• Production Linux kernel development, including debugging use-after-free, refcount and leak bugs with KASAN, kdump, ftrace, perf or bpftrace
• Working knowledge of the scheduler and memory management (EEVDF, memcg)
• Experience managing a kernel patch stack and working with upstream communities
• Solid understanding of the Linux network stack (TCP/IP, sk_buff lifecycle, qdiscs, NIC drivers) and XDP or eBPF, with deep expertise in at least one of these areas
• Operational discipline: staged rollouts, canaries, kill switches, observability, postmortems and closing action items
• Understanding of distributed systems: control plane and datapath consistency, partial failure and safe config rollout at fleet scale
• Ability to design broadly scoped work and drive it across teams

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for kernel projects, own them end to end from problem statement to fleet rollout, and mentor engineers on the team
• Take new servers, CPUs and NICs from first boot to full fleet: drivers, IRQ affinity, RSS and queue layout on high core count hosts
• Improve datapath and transport performance with XDP, eBPF and protocol work based on IETF specifications
• Debug problems that cross layers with application teams, such as MTU behavior, cgroup memory accounting and packet filtering
• Develop and maintain kernel changes and the company kernel modules on our long term kernel line, and reduce our private delta by upstreaming
• Make sure state pushed from control planes to eBPF and XDP programs is applied, verified and safe to roll back
• Own kernel health in production: triage crashes, WARNs and regressions across the fleet, find the root cause and ship the fix
• Own and improve the kernel release process and the signals behind it: CI, bake, canary, staged rollout and rollback across thousands of servers, plus crash metrics and drift detection that fire before customers notice
• Join the on-call rotation, lead the kernel side of incidents and drive follow-up actions to closure

Skills

C programming

Kernel debugging

Leadership

Distributed systems

Networking knowledge

XDP/eBPF

Upstream collaboration

Tools

KASAN

kdump

ftrace

perf

bpftrace

Job description

Fastly, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Linux Edge Kernel to own end‑to‑end kernel problems across a global edge fleet.

You will drive performance improvements, coordinate with application teams, and upstream changes to maintain a robust, scalable kernel path on thousands of servers. You will lead with responsibility for cross‑team design, triage crashes, and shape the kernel release process, including CI, canaries, and canary rollouts.