Staff Software Engineer - Linux Kernel

Fastly, Inc.; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 211,000 - 254,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity program

Discretionary bonus

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Fastly, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Linux Edge Kernel to own end‑to‑end kernel problems across a global edge fleet.

You will drive performance improvements, coordinate with application teams, and upstream changes to maintain a robust, scalable kernel path on thousands of servers. You will lead with responsibility for cross‑team design, triage crashes, and shape the kernel release process, including CI, canaries, and canary rollouts.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of related engineering experience, including substantial production C, with 3 of those years leading technical projects.
• Production Linux kernel development, 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 working with 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

Responsibilities

• 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 the company 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

Skills

C programming

Kernel debugging

Leadership

Distributed systems

Networking knowledge

XDP/eBPF

Upstream collaboration

Tools

KASAN

kdump

ftrace

perf

bpftrace

Job description

the company helps people stay better connected with the things they love. the company’s edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers’ applications as close to their end-users as possible — at the edge of the Internet. The platform is designed to take advantage of the modern internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development. the company’s customers include many of the world’s most prominent companies, including GitHub, Yelp, Paramount, and JetBlue.

We're building a more trustworthy Internet. Come join us.

Posting Open Date:

10/07/2026

**Anticipated Posting Close Date*: **11/6/26

**Job posting may close early due to the volume of applicants.*

Staff Software Engineer, Linux Edge Kernel

the company's Kernel and Host Networking team builds and ships the Linux kernel that runs on every server in our global edge network, and every customer request passes through it. As a Staff engineer you own technical problems end to end: from a crash signature or a new NIC on the bench, through root cause and design, to a change that is upstreamed and safely running on thousands of servers. The work spans networking, XDP and eBPF, memory, performance and hardware enablement. It also spans layers. Our kernel is the datapath of a distributed system whose control planes are constantly pushing new state to the fleet, so staying correct under change is part of the job. Formal CS education is not required; demonstrable experience is what matters.

What You'll Do:

• 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 the company 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

What We're Looking For:

• 7+ years of related engineering experience, including substantial production C, with 3 of those years leading technical projects

• Production Linux kernel development, 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 working with 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

We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these:

• Upstream kernel contributions or subsystem maintainership

• Deep Knowledge of Transport protocols from IETF RFCs: QUIC, TCP, ECN and L4S, MASQUE

• Hardware enablement on AMD EPYC or Intel platforms, and NIC drivers such as mlx5, ice or i40e

• Load balancing or traffic steering systems

• CDN or large edge network environments

• Container networking: network namespaces, veth, cgroups, and eBPF-based CNI datapaths

Work Hours:

This position requires availability during core business hours and participation in an on-call rotation.

Work Location(s) & Travel Requirements:

This position is open to remote and hybrid work locations in the United States. Our US the company offices are located in:

• New York, NY

• San Francisco, CA

• Denver, CO

This position may require travel as required by your role or requested by your manager.

SF / LA Fair Chance Ordinance Statement

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Salary:

The estimated salary range for this position in the US is $211,370 to $253,644.

Starting salary may vary based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as experience, skills, qualifications, and location.

This role may be eligible to participate in the company’s equity and discretionary bonus programs.

Benefits:

We care about you. the company works hard to create a positive environment for our employees, and we think your life outside of work is important too. We support our teams with great benefits that start on the first day of your employment with the company. Curious about our offerings?

We offer a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance. Family planning, mental health support along with Employee Assistance Program, Insurance (Life, Disability, and Accident), a Flexible Vacation policy and up to 18 days of accrued paid sick leave are there to help support our employees. We also offer 401(k) (including company match) and an Employee Stock Purchase Program. For 2026, we offer 11 paid local holidays, 12 paid company wellness days.

Why the company?

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We have a huge impact.

the company is a small company with a big reach. Not only doour customershave a tremendous user base, but we also support a growing number ofopen source projects and initiatives.Outside of code, employees are encouraged to share causes close to their heart with others so we can help lend a supportive hand.

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We value diversity.

Growing and maintaining our inclusive and diverse team matters to us. We are committed to being a company where our employees feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work and have the ability to be successful -- every day.

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We are passionate.

the company is chock full of passionate people and we’re not ‘one size fits all’. the company employs authors, pilots, skiers, parents (of humans and animals), makeup geeks, coffee connoisseurs, and more. We love employees for who they are and what they are passionate about.

We’re al