Senior System Software Engineer, Software-Defined Networking

NVIDIA Corporation; United States; Remote; USD 224,000 - 357,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Benefits

Job summary

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

You will design, implement, and operate secure, programmable networking using Open vSwitch, OVN, Kubernetes, C, and Go, collaborating across teams to drive architecture, qualification, and production improvements.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in CS or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years in production software design and maintenance in C and Go.
• Experience with Open vSwitch and OVN including OpenFlow.
• Prod Kubernetes networking experience with CNI, policies, and traffic paths.
• Strong Linux networking fundamentals and IP/TCP/UDP knowledge.
• Experience architecting distributed systems with secure APIs and scalability.
• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, deployments, and observability.
• On-call experience and incident response with logs and metrics.

Responsibilities

• Define, review, and evolve multi-tenant control-plane and data-plane architecture.
• Provide technical leadership through design reviews and production readiness.
• Develop and review production software for Kubernetes networking and VM networking.
• Translate requirements into secure orchestration services and APIs.
• Drive Open vSwitch and OVN integration across performance and reliability.
• Build automated tests and integrate with CI/CD and release workflows.
• Share on-call rotation and lead networking escalations with partners.
• Improve reliability, performance, security, and observability for production networks.

Skills

Open vSwitch

OVN

Kubernetes networking

C programming

Go programming

Bash scripting

Python scripting

Distributed systems

Network security

Education

BS in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Open vSwitch

OVN

OpenFlow

Kubernetes

Linux networking

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-development tooling, 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 Streaming, Network Site Reliability/. If you’re a creative engineer who enjoys autonomy and shares our passion for technology, we want to hear from you.

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 224,000 USD - 356,500 USD.

You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

Applications for this job will be accepted at least until September 17, 2026.

This posting is for an existing vacancy.

NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes.

NVIDIA is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law.