System Software Engineer (SDN)

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. Build and operate secure, programmable cloud networking using Open vSwitch, OVN, Kubernetes, C, and Go. Collaborate with senior engineers, NVIDIA architects, and partner teams to lead architecture, implementation, qualification, issue response, and production improvements.

What you’ll be doing:

• 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.

• 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.

Ways to stand out from the crowd:

• 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., Application Programming Interface (API), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Authentication, Automation, Bash Scripting, Cloud Computing, Code Reviews, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Concrete, Configuration Management, Content Delivery/Distribution, Continuous Deployment/Delivery, Continuous Integration, Data Processing, Debugging Skills, Delivery Driving, Distributed Computing, Energy Efficiency, GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), Gaming, IP (Internet Protocol), Incident Response, Infrastructure Software, Interoperability, K Virtual Machine (KVM), Linux Networks, Linux Operating System, Mentoring, Metrics, Network Routing, Network Software, Network Switching, On Call, Open Source, Performance Analysis, Performance Management, Problem Solving Skills, Production Support, Programming Tools, Python Programming/Scripting Language, Quality Management, REST (Representational State Transfer), Reliability Engineering, Software Administration, Software Development, Software Engineering, Storage Software, Strategic Planning, System Architecture, System Operations, Systems Engineering, TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), Team Player, Technical Leadership, Telemetry, Test Automation, Testing, UDP (User Datagram Protocol), Virtual Hosting, Virtual Machine (VM), Virtualization, Web Client Plug-ins

With competitive salaries and a generous benefits package, NVIDIA is widely considered to be one of the technology industry’s most desirable employers. We work with some of the most forward-thinking, versatile people in the world, and our engineering teams are growing fast in some of the most impactful fields of our generation: Cloud Gaming, Cloud Streaming, Network Site Reliability/. If you’re a creative engineer who enjoys autonomy and shares our passion for technology, we want to hear from you.

Your base salary will be determined based on your location, experience, and the pay of employees in similar positions. The base salary range is 224,000 USD - 356,500 USD.

You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.

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 Corp

Visualize your future . . . We Do NVIDIA is the world leader in graphics processing technologies, creating innovative, industry-changing products for computing, consumer electronics, and mobile devices. NVIDIA products are transforming visually-rich applications such as video games, film production, broadcasting, industrial design, space exploration, and medical imaging. We invest in our people and our technologies, support and fund industry research around the world, and consistently deliver high-quality products. NVIDIA’s culture promotes and inspires a team of world-class employees to be at the top of their game. We’ve created an environment where talents are recognized and collaboration is valued. Our employees are shaping the world of tomorrow. . . today. We invite you to explore the opportunities available at NVIDIA to see what your future may hold.

Company Size: 10,000 employees or more