At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead kernel projects, debug issues, and improve performance on a global edge network.
- Company: Fastly, a dynamic tech company focused on building a trustworthy Internet.
- Benefits: Comprehensive benefits, flexible vacation, and equity opportunities.
- Other info: Remote work options available with excellent career growth potential.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on the Internet while working with cutting-edge technology.
- Qualifications: 7+ years in engineering, strong Linux kernel development, and team leadership skills.
Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly’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.
Fastly’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 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.
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. This position may require travel as required by your role or requested by your manager.
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.
Benefits: 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.
Why Fastly? We value diversity and 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.
Staff Software Engineer employer: Fastly, Inc.
Fastly is an exceptional employer that fosters a dynamic and inclusive work culture, offering employees the flexibility of a hybrid work model while being part of a small yet impactful company. With comprehensive benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance, as well as generous vacation policies and opportunities for professional growth, Fastly empowers its team to thrive both personally and professionally. Join us in building a more trustworthy Internet and be part of a passionate community that values diversity and innovation.
