Senior System Software Engineer (SDN)

Within the NVIDIA Gaming Network (NGN) infrastructure/storage group, the NGN Software-Defined Storage (SDS) team focuses on storage and infrastructure software for NGN/GeForce NOW, with work spanning NGN 2.x Kubernetes, block storage, performance/scale, security, tenant storage, tenant gameseat, and related central NGN services.

NVIDIA is looking for a Senior System Software Engineer (SDN) to advance software-defined networking for global GPU cloud infrastructure that enables AI workloads, cloud gaming, content delivery, and other accelerated services.

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with engineers and architects to define, review, and evolve multi-tenant control-plane and data-plane architecture using Open vSwitch, OVN, OpenFlow, and overlay network technologies.
• Demonstrate technical leadership and mentorship through design and code reviews, implementation guidance, production-readiness decisions, and improvements to engineering quality.
• Develop and review production software for Kubernetes networking, network plugins, distributed control planes, Linux host networking, virtual-machine networking, and network automation.
• Translate product and infrastructure requirements into secure orchestration services, APIs, component boundaries, state models, compatibility strategies, and delivery plans while driving shared decisions.
• Drive Open vSwitch and OVN integration across flow behavior, configuration, lifecycle management, upgrades, interoperability, performance, failure recovery, and large-scale production operation.
• Build and implement automated unit, integration, system, performance, scale, and upgrade tests connected to continuous integration, deployment, and release-qualification workflows.
• Share the team’s on-call rotation and lead networking escalations with partner teams. Use packet captures, SDN state, telemetry, profiling, controlled experiments, and source debugging to resolve incidents and prevent recurrence.
• Define and improve reliability, performance, security, and resource-efficiency objectives while engineering actionable monitoring, telemetry, tracing, and service-level visibility for production networks.

Requirements:

• BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years of proven experience designing, implementing, testing, and maintaining production software in both C and Go, with Bash and Python used for test, diagnostic, build, or operational automation.
• Concrete experience developing, integrating, and solving issues in Open vSwitch and OVN, including OpenFlow and control-plane-to-data-plane behavior.
• Production Kubernetes networking experience, including container network interfaces, network policy, node and pod traffic paths, network-plugins, upgrades, and failure modes.
• Strong Linux networking fundamentals and practical understanding of IP, TCP, UDP, routing, switching, overlay networks, tunneling, network namespaces, and network policy.
• Experience architecting distributed systems with secure service APIs, state management, consistency, scalability, compatibility, and failure handling.
• Experience handling the production lifecycle through automated testing, CI/CD, deployments, upgrades, observability, and performance analysis.
• Experience supporting production services through a shared on-call rotation and coordinating incident response through evidence from flows, logs, metrics, traces, profiles, experiments, and source-level debugging.
• Collaborative architecture and technical leadership through written designs, consequential decisions, cross-team work, critical reviews, mentoring, and delivery of significant systems through production operation.

Nice to Have:

• Contributions to Open vSwitch, OVN, OVN-Kubernetes, Kubernetes networking, or another relevant open-source project.
• Experience with large-scale cloud and accelerated virtualization systems, including SR-IOV, RDMA, SmartNICs, data processing units, network function virtualization, KVM/QEMU, or container runtimes.
• Experience building secure, high-performance gRPC or REST services using transport security and strong authentication.
• Applied use of agentic AI and AI-assisted software-development tooling, including coding agents, reusable skills, or Model Context Protocol integrations.

What We Offer:

• Competitive salaries and a generous benefits package.
• Base salary range: 224,000 USD - 356,500 USD.
• Equity and benefits eligibility.