Staff Linux Kernel Engineer - Edge Networking & Scale

Fastly, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Sur place; USD 211 000 - 254 000; Plein temps

Avantages offerts par ce poste

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) with company match

Employee Stock Purchase Program

Paid holidays

Résumé du poste

Fastly, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Linux Edge Kernel to own end-to-end kernel problems, from bench to fleet rollout, including coordination with upstream communities. You will drive performance and reliability across thousands of servers, shaping the edge kernel strategy.

The role emphasizes leadership, cross-team collaboration, and hands-on kernel work on XDP/eBPF, NICs, and drivers, with opportunities to upstream changes and improve production stability.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of related engineering experience, including substantial production C, with 3 of those years leading technical projects.
• Production Linux kernel development experience, including debugging use-after-free, refcount and leak bugs with KASAN, kdump, ftrace, perf or bpftrace.
• Working knowledge of the scheduler and memory management (EEVDF, memcg).
• Experience managing a kernel patch stack and upstream communities.
• Solid understanding of the Linux network stack (TCP/IP, sk_buff lifecycle, qdiscs, NIC drivers) and XDP or eBPF, with deep expertise in at least one of these areas.
• Operational discipline: staged rollouts, canaries, kill switches, observability, postmortems and closing action items.
• Understanding of distributed systems: control plane and datapath consistency, partial failure and safe config rollout at fleet scale.
• Ability to design broadly scoped work and drive it across teams.

Responsabilités

• Set technical direction for kernel projects, own them end to end from problem statement to fleet rollout, and mentor engineers on the team.
• Take new servers, CPUs and NICs from first boot to full fleet: drivers, IRQ affinity, RSS and queue layout on high core count hosts.
• Improve datapath and transport performance with XDP, eBPF and protocol work based on IETF specifications.
• Debug problems that cross layers with application teams, such as MTU behavior, cgroup memory accounting and packet filtering.
• Develop and maintain kernel changes and Fastly kernel modules on our long term kernel line, and reduce our private delta by upstreaming.
• Make sure state pushed from control planes to eBPF and XDP programs is applied, verified and safe to roll back.
• Own kernel health in production: triage crashes, WARNs and regressions across the fleet, find the root cause and ship the fix.
• Own and improve the kernel release process and the signals behind it: CI, bake, canary, staged rollout and rollback across thousands of servers, plus crash metrics and drift detection that fire before customers notice.
• Join the on-call rotation, lead the kernel side of incidents and drive follow-up actions to closure.

Connaissances

C programming

Linux kernel development

XDP/eBPF

Networking

KASAN/kdump/ftrace

Performance optimization

Upstream collaboration

Kernel patching

Formation

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Outils

bpftrace

ftrace

perf

Description du poste

Fastly, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Linux Edge Kernel to own end-to-end kernel problems, from bench to fleet rollout, including coordination with upstream communities. You will drive performance and reliability across thousands of servers, shaping the edge kernel strategy.

The role emphasizes leadership, cross-team collaboration, and hands-on kernel work on XDP/eBPF, NICs, and drivers, with opportunities to upstream changes and improve production stability.