Senior SDN Engineer: Open vSwitch, OVN & Kubernetes

Socket.dev; Washington; Hybrid; USD 224,000 - 357,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA is seeking a Senior System Software Engineer (SDN) to advance software-defined networking for global GPU cloud infrastructure that enables AI workloads, cloud gaming, content delivery, and other accelerated services.

You will build and operate secure, programmable cloud networking using Open vSwitch, OVN, Kubernetes, C, and Go, collaborating with senior engineers and partner teams to drive architecture, implementation, qualification, and production improvements.

Qualifications

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years of proven experience designing, implementing, testing, and maintaining production software in both C and Go, with Bash and Python used for test, diagnostic, build, or operational automation.
• Concrete experience developing, integrating, and solving issues in Open vSwitch and OVN, including OpenFlow and control-plane-to-data-plane behavior.
• Production Kubernetes networking experience, including container network interfaces, network policy, node and pod traffic paths, network-plugins, upgrades, and failure modes.
• Strong Linux networking fundamentals and practical understanding of IP, TCP, UDP, routing, switching, overlay networks, tunneling, network namespaces, and network policy.
• Experience architecting distributed systems with secure service APIs, state management, consistency, scalability, compatibility, and failure handling.
• Experience handling the production lifecycle through automated testing, CI/CD, deployments, upgrades, observability, and performance analysis.
• Experience supporting production services through a shared on-call rotation and coordinating incident response through evidence from flows, logs, metrics, traces, profiles, experiments, and source-level debugging.
• Collaborative architecture and technical leadership through written designs, consequential decisions, cross-team work, critical reviews, mentoring, and delivery of significant systems through production operation.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with engineers and architects to define, review, and evolve multi-tenant control-plane and data-plane architecture using Open vSwitch, OVN, OpenFlow, and overlay network technologies.
• Demonstrate technical leadership and mentorship through design and code reviews, implementation guidance, production-readiness decisions, and improvements to engineering quality.
• Develop and review production software for Kubernetes networking, network plugins, distributed control planes, Linux host networking, virtual-machine networking, and network automation.
• Translate product and infrastructure requirements into secure orchestration services, APIs, component boundaries, state models, compatibility strategies, and delivery plans while driving shared decisions.
• Drive Open vSwitch and OVN integration across flow behavior, configuration, lifecycle management, upgrades, interoperability, performance, failure recovery, and large-scale production operation.
• Build and implement automated unit, integration, system, performance, scale, and upgrade tests connected to continuous integration, deployment, and release-qualification workflows.
• Share the team’s on-call rotation and lead networking escalations with partner teams. Use packet captures, SDN state, telemetry, profiling, controlled experiments, and source debugging to resolve incidents and prevent recurrence.
• Define and improve reliability, performance, security, and resource-efficiency objectives while engineering actionable monitoring, telemetry, tracing, and service-level visibility for production networks.

Skills

Open vSwitch

OVN

OpenFlow

Kubernetes networking

C

Go

Bash

Python

Education

BS or MS in Computer Science/Engineering

Tools

Kubernetes

Linux

QEMU/KVM

Job description

NVIDIA is seeking a Senior System Software Engineer (SDN) to advance software-defined networking for global GPU cloud infrastructure that enables AI workloads, cloud gaming, content delivery, and other accelerated services.

You will build and operate secure, programmable cloud networking using Open vSwitch, OVN, Kubernetes, C, and Go, collaborating with senior engineers and partner teams to drive architecture, implementation, qualification, and production improvements.