Staff Linux Kernel Engineer - Edge Networking & Performance

Fastly, Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 211,000 - 254,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) match

Employee Stock Purchase Program

Paid holidays

Wellness days

Flexible vacation

Job summary

Fastly, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Linux Edge Kernel. You will own end-to-end kernel projects, set direction, and mentor engineers while expanding our edge platform across servers worldwide.

The role covers driver development, NICs, and performance work with XDP/eBPF, requires strong C and production kernel experience, and entails on-call duties, collaboration with upstream communities, and a focus on reliability at scale.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of related engineering experience with production C.
• Production Linux kernel development and debugging of kernel issues.
• Strong understanding of the Linux networking stack and XDP/eBPF.
• Experience contributing patches upstream and collaborating with communities.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for kernel projects end-to-end and mentor engineers.
• Take new servers and NICs from first boot to fleet deployment with drivers and tuning.
• Improve datapath performance using XDP/eBPF and protocol work.
• Debug cross-layer issues with application teams (MTU, memory, filtering).
• Develop and maintain kernel changes and upstream them where possible.
• Ensure state pushed from control planes to eBPF/XDP programs is safe.
• Own kernel health in production, triage crashes and regressions.
• Own kernel release process, CI, canaries, and staged rollout strategies.
• Join on-call rotation and drive follow-up actions to closure.

Skills

Linux kernel development

C programming

XDP/eBPF

Networking stack

Upstream collaboration

Tools

KASAN

kdump

ftrace

perf

bpftrace

Job description

Fastly, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Linux Edge Kernel. You will own end-to-end kernel projects, set direction, and mentor engineers while expanding our edge platform across servers worldwide.

The role covers driver development, NICs, and performance work with XDP/eBPF, requires strong C and production kernel experience, and entails on-call duties, collaboration with upstream communities, and a focus on reliability at scale.