Software Engineer, Network Infrastructure

Render; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid vacation

Parental leave

Medical coverage

Dental and vision coverage

Wellness stipend

Cell phone stipend

Commuter benefits

Learning benefits

Job summary

Render is building a modern cloud platform for developers, delivering a secure and scalable infrastructure that empowers teams to ship fast and scale confidently. You will own core network infrastructure, shaping traffic routing and connectivity across data centers and cloud providers to support thousands of services.

You will work with Go and Linux networking, drive reliability through incident response, and collaborate across teams to ensure a robust platform in a rapidly growing company.

Qualifications

• 6+ years building large-scale networking systems.
• Expertise in Kubernetes networking internals or similar.
• Strong Linux networking experience in production environments.

Responsibilities

• Own Render's core network infrastructure across data centers and cloud providers.
• Design and build customer-facing networking capabilities.
• Investigate complex networking issues across the stack.
• Drive performance and reliability improvements through profiling.
• Partner with engineers to build a stable, secure platform.
• Participate in on-call rotation and incident learning.

Skills

Networking at scale

Kubernetes networking

Linux networking

Distributed systems

Incident response

Go language

Tools

Kubernetes

Go

eBPF

Linux kernel networking

Job description

At Render, we’re building the modern cloud platform for developers creating AI-native, full-stack, multi-service applications. Our mission is to eliminate the tradeoff between the power of hyperscalers and the simplicity of developer-friendly platforms—so teams can ship fast, scale reliably, and focus on their product, not infrastructure.

Unlike complex hyperscalers or ephemerally edge/serverless solutions, Render offers a developer-first experience with persistent compute, dynamic autoscaling, built-in orchestration, and observability, allowing teams to launch, scale, and manage real-world applications without writing infrastructure code or managing servers. Whether you're building LLM-powered applications, scalable SaaS products, or async processing pipelines, Render empowers teams to move fast and scale confidently from MVP to millions of users.

Our platform is trusted by over 6 million developers worldwide and continues to grow rapidly. In February 2026, we raised an additional $100M in Series C financing, bringing our total funding to $257M, to accelerate our vision of making cloud infrastructure both powerful and intuitive—designed for the speed of modern AI development.

We’re a diverse and talented team that values craft, velocity, and user experience. If you’re excited to help shape the future of the intelligent cloud and empower developers everywhere, we’d love to hear from you.

Applying to Render

We're seeking candidates who possess high integrity, humility, and an insatiable drive to learn. Through reasoned discussions and continuous feedback, we strive to improve both individually and collectively. We foster an environment of mutual trust and respect, empowering effective debate to achieve the best outcomes for our customers and team.

We especially encourage members of underrepresented groups in the tech community to apply and understand that not all successful candidates will meet each requirement listed.

Our interview process is unique to each role, and we value the candidate experience just as much as our customer experience. We hope your conversations with us reflect a thoughtful process that is illuminative, enjoyable, and respectful of your time.

About the Role

Render's mission is to eliminate the undifferentiated work that goes into building software products by offering an easy-to-use, powerful cloud platform for developer teams of all sizes.

We are scaling rapidly. Our customers have created hundreds of thousands of services on our platform, and the numbers continue to accelerate. Our customers trust us to deliver a secure, reliable and performant cloud—this is our top priority as a company.

By joining us at an early stage, you will design and build the cloud platform you've always wanted for yourself, and make decisions that will shape our product and company, directly impacting developers around the globe.

Render builds and operates our own networking stack end-to-end. We leverage open source and industry-standard technologies, modifying and extending the core components to meet the unique reliability, performance, and scaling demands of our platform.

We are looking for engineers with deep specialization in network infrastructure. We are particularly interested in experience with Kubernetes networking internals, edge/ingress proxies, or data center networking and transit.

Areas of focus include scaling and evolving our traffic routing and load balancing systems; advancing Kubernetes and Linux networking components to support large-scale, zero-downtime operation; designing our hybrid cloud and bare metal network architecture, including transit and cross-cluster connectivity; and exploring networking for Render’s next-generation compute platforms.

What You'll Do

• Own Render's core network infrastructure across multiple data centers and cloud providers. Shape how networking evolves as Render rapidly scales.

• Design and build customer-facing networking capabilities that give users greater flexibility in how their services connect, communicate, and how traffic is routed.

• Investigate complex networking issues across the stack, from the kernel and data plane to distributed systems and edge networking.

• Drive performance and reliability improvements through systematic profiling and tuning.

• Partner with engineers across the company to build a platform that is stable, predictable, and secure.

• Participate in our on-call rotation. Help continuously improve how we detect, respond to, and learn from incidents.

What We're Looking For

• At least 6 years of experience building and operating large-scale networking or infrastructure systems.

• Experience with Kubernetes networking internals (e.g. kube-proxy, CNI plugins, service routing) or similar container networking technology.

• Experience with Linux networking internals (e.g. routing, netfilter/iptables/nftables, conntrack) in production environments.

• Experience building and operating traffic routing systems (e.g. load balancers, ingress, proxies) at scale.

• Strong experience designing, debugging, and operating distributed systems.

• Experience planning and executing high-risk changes with minimal downtime.

Nice‑to‑haves

• Experience with data center or hybrid cloud networking (e.g. BGP, AWS Direct Connect, Arista/Juniper).

• Experience with eBPF or advanced Linux kernel networking.

• Experience developing systems in Go or similar languages that interact with low-level OS and networking primitives.

Relevant Links from the Render Engineering Team

• The Namespaces Scaling Trap (video podcast interview) and related article How We Found 7 TiB of Memory Just Sitting Around

• SEV0 SF 2025 | Boundary Cases: Technical and social challenges in cross-system debugging

• Distributing Global State to Serve over 1 Billion Daily Requests

• Breaking down OpenAI's outage: How to avoid a hidden DNS dependency in Kubernetes

• Kubernetes Informers are so easy... to misuse!

If this role excites you but you don’t meet every single requirement, we’d still love to hear from you—your unique experience might be just what we need.

Benefits

• 4 weeks of paid vacation.

• 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return.

• Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans.

• 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs and HSAs are available as well.

• Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.

• Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.

• Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders.

• Continuous learning benefits & related support.

This position is generally not eligible for new visa sponsorship. At Render's discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers. Applicants who require sponsorship must receive business authorization.

Render is an equal-opportunity employer. We know that employing a team rich in diverse thoughts, experiences, and opinions allows our employees, product, and community to flourish. We make all employment decisions including hiring, evaluation, termination, promotional, and training opportunities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical handicap, mental disability, medical condition, disability, gender or identity or expression, pregnancy or pregnancy-related condition, marital status, height and/or weight.

We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.

We encourage all who are interested to apply. We can't wait to hear from you!

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