Senior Network Datapath Engineer - Remote

Emploive; Denver, Northern (CO, KY); Hybrid; USD 167,000 - 209,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote role

Job summary

DigitalOcean is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Network Datapath to design, develop, and optimize high-performance network datapath software across our cloud infrastructure. You will work at the intersection of networking, operating systems, distributed systems, and high-performance software to deliver scalable, low-latency networking at scale.

The role focuses on software running in and around the network datapath, including packet processing, forwarding, routing, acceleration,

Qualifications

• Strong experience designing and developing production software in C, C++, or Go.
• Strong understanding of networking and packet processing.
• Experience debugging and optimizing performance-sensitive systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and optimize high-performance network datapath software for DigitalOcean's cloud infrastructure.
• Build and improve packet-processing and forwarding systems with a focus on throughput, latency, CPU efficiency, scalability, and reliability.
• Develop networking functionality across the host, kernel, user space, and hardware-accelerated datapath.
• Work with technologies such as Linux networking, eBPF, XDP, DPDK, AF_XDP, SR-IOV, and programmable datapaths.
• Analyze packet-processing paths and identify opportunities to eliminate bottlenecks and improve performance.
• Develop software for routing, packet filtering, encapsulation, tunneling, load balancing, traffic steering, and network virtualization.
• Build and improve datapath observability, telemetry, debugging, and performance monitoring.
• Design software that integrates with DPUs, SmartNICs, programmable NICs, and other hardware acceleration technologies.
• Develop automated testing and benchmarking frameworks to validate datapath correctness and performance.
• Investigate complex production networking issues, including packet drops, latency, throughput degradation, CPU utilization, and unexpected traffic behavior.
• Work with Network Infrastructure and Compute engineers to integrate datapath functionality into DigitalOcean's broader infrastructure architecture.
• Contribute to the design and implementation of next-generation network architectures.
• Author RFCs, architecture documents, technical proposals, design documents, and implementation plans to drive complex networking initiatives.
• Clearly document technical decisions, tradeoffs, performance characteristics, dependencies, and operational considerations.
• Participate in design reviews and provide technical guidance to other engineers.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to improving software engineering and networking practices across the organization.

Skills

C/C++/Go

Networking knowledge

Linux networking

High-performance systems

Multithreaded software

Job description

DigitalOcean is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Network Datapath to design, develop, and optimize high-performance network datapath software across our cloud infrastructure. You will work at the intersection of networking, operating systems, distributed systems, and high-performance software to deliver scalable, low-latency networking at scale.

The role focuses on software running in and around the network datapath, including packet processing, forwarding, routing, acceleration,