Principal Engineer, Software Defined Networking

We are looking for a Principal 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
• 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 a comparable blend of education and relevant experience
• 15+ 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, OVS‑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)

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