Senior System Software Engineer, Software Defined Networking — San Francisco

We are looking for a Senior System Software Engineer, Software Defined Networking to design, build, and operate highly performant and scalable SDN solutions for NVIDIA's AI Clouds hosting GPU-accelerated workloads — including hyperscale multi-node training, inference, cloud gaming, and cloud functions. This role spans the full lifecycle of our SDN stack — from designing and developing new control and data plane software to ensuring operational excellence in production through reliability engineering, CI/CD, observability, and incident response. What you'll be doing: • Design and develop next-generation multi-tenant cloud SDN control and data plane software (OVS, OVN, OpenFlow) • Build Infrastructure-as-a-Service virtual network orchestration and services using gRPC and REST to support tenant workload security and performance SLAs for BMaaS, VMaaS, and Kubernetes • Drive upstream contributions to OVN-Kubernetes and related open-source projects • Develop software for network observability — monitoring, telemetry, intelligent metering, and performance analysis • Operate and support OVS-OVN based SDN solutions in large-scale NVIDIA AI Cloud environments • Own end-to-end observability for the SDN stack — build and maintain monitoring, alerting, distributed tracing, and dashboarding to ensure real-time insight into network health, performance, and tenant SLAs • Design, enhance, and maintain CI/CD pipelines (GitLab) across Linux host networking, OVS, OVN, and Kubernetes CNIs • Implement GitOps approaches or related experience for secure, seamless integration with cloud infrastructure • Drive reliability through incident management, resource monitoring, and performance tuning • Collaborate with SRE, DevOps, and network engineering teams on production readiness and operational tooling What we need to see: • BS/MS in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent experience • 8+ years of proven experience in software development for large-scale distributed environments • Expert-level knowledge of OVN, OVS, OpenFlow, and modern network protocols • Strong programming skills in C and Go; advanced scripting in Bash and Python • Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, practical experience deploying and supporting CNIs (OVN-Kubernetes) • Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and deployment tools (Ansible, Terraform, ArgoCD, Flux) • Experience designing and operating complex, multi-stage CI/CD pipelines • Hands-on experience developing secure, high-performance services using gRPC and REST with TLS and strong authentication • Strong knowledge of datacenter routing, switching, and Linux host/VM networking Ways to stand out from the crowd: • Contributions to open-source projects (especially OVS, OVN, OVN-Kubernetes, or other Kubernetes networking projects) • Experience with hardware acceleration (GPU, DPU or equivalent experience) for networking  • Practical experience with major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and hybrid/multi-cloud deployments • SRE/DevOps top-level expertise — on-call, incident management, operations focused on service reliability targets, production ownership • Experience with observability platforms and tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, ELK) With a competitive salary package and benefits, NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology world’s most desirable employers. We have some of the most forward-thinking and hardworking people in the world working for us. Are you a creative and autonomous Systems Software Engineer who loves challenges? Do you have a genuine passion for advancing the state of Networking, SDN, and Cloud Networking across a variety of industries? If so, we want to hear from you. Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and other objective job-related factors. The expected base salary range for this position is 184,000 USD – 287,500 USD. You will also be eligible for equity and benefits . Applications for this job will be accepted at least until November 3, 2026. This posting is for an existing vacancy.  NVIDIA uses AI tools in its recruiting processes. NVIDIA is committed to fostering an inclusive work environment and proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As we highly value diversity in our current and future employees, we do not discriminate (including in our hiring and promotion practices) on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law.