Senior System Software Engineer, Software-Defined Networking

NVIDIA; California (MO); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

NVIDIA is seeking a Senior System Software Engineer (SDN) to advance software-defined networking for global GPU cloud infrastructure powering AI workloads, cloud gaming, and content delivery. Build and operate secure, programmable cloud networking using Open vSwitch, OVN, Kubernetes, C, and Go.

You will collaborate with senior engineers, architects, and partner teams to drive architecture, qualification, and production improvements while maintaining high reliability and performance in

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 C and Go; Bash and Python for automation.
• Concrete experience with Open vSwitch and OVN, including OpenFlow and control-plane–to–data-plane behavior.
• Production Kubernetes networking experience, including CNI, network policy, and upgrades.
• Strong Linux networking fundamentals: IP/TCP/UDP, routing, overlay networks, tunneling, namespaces, and policy.
• Experience architecting distributed systems with secure APIs, state management, and scalability.
• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, deployments, observability, and performance analysis.
• Experience coordinating incident response and on-call rotations.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with engineers and architects to define and evolve multi-tenant control-plane and data-plane architecture using Open vSwitch, OVN, OpenFlow, and overlays.
• Demonstrate technical leadership through design reviews, production-readiness decisions, and quality improvements.
• Develop and review production software for Kubernetes networking, network plugins, distributed control planes, and host networking.
• Translate requirements into secure orchestration services, APIs, and delivery plans; drive shared decisions.
• Drive Open vSwitch and OVN integration across flow behavior, upgrades, and large-scale production operation.
• Build and implement automated tests connected to CI/CD and release workflows.
• Share on-call rotation and lead networking escalations using traces, logs, and telemetry.
• Define reliability, performance, security, and resource-efficiency objectives; improve monitoring and visibility.

Skills

Open vSwitch

OVN

Kubernetes networking

C

Go

Bash

Python

Linux networking

Distributed systems

CI/CD

Incidents response

Open source collaboration

Education

BS/MS in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Open vSwitch

OVN

Job description

Within the NVIDIA Gaming Network (NGN) infrastructure/storage group, the NGN Software-Defined Storage (SDS) team focuses on storage and infrastructure software for NGN/GeForce NOW, with work spanning NGN 2.x Kubernetes, block storage, performance/scale, security, tenant storage, tenant gameseat, and related central NGN services.

NVIDIA is looking for 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. Build and operate secure, programmable cloud networking using Open vSwitch, OVN, Kubernetes, C, and Go. Collaborate with senior engineers, NVIDIA architects, and partner teams to lead architecture, implementation, qualification, issue response, and production improvements.

What you'll be doing:

• 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.

What we need to see:

• 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.

Ways to stand out from the crowd:

• Contributions to Open vSwitch, OVN, OVN-Kubernetes, Kubernetes networking, or another relevant open-source project.
• Experience with large-scale cloud and accelerated virtualization systems, including SR-IOV, RDMA, SmartNICs, data processing units, network function virtualization, KVM/QEMU, or container runtimes.
• Experience building secure, high-performance gRPC or REST services using transport security and strong authentication.
• Applied use of agentic AI and AI-assisted software-developmenttooling, including coding agents, reusable skills, or Model Context Protocol integrations.

With competitive salaries and a generous benefits package, NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology industry's most desirable employers. We work with some of the most forward-thinking, versatile people in the world, and our engineering teams are growing fast in some of the most impactful fields of our generation: Cloud Gaming, Cloud Str