Staff Software Engineer - Linux Kernel
Fastly · Denver, CO; New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA
About this role
**Staff Software Engineer - Linux Kernel (Linux Edge Kernel) — Fastly** **About Fastly** 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 applications as close to end-users as possible. **Posting Dates** - **Open Date:** 10/07/2026 - **Anticipated Close Date:** 11/6/26 *(may close early based on applicant volume)* --- ## What You’ll Do - Set technical direction for kernel projects; own work end-to-end from problem statement to fleet rollout, and mentor engineers. - Bring new servers/CPUs/NICs from first boot to full fleet (drivers, IRQ affinity, RSS, and queue layout on high core-count hosts). - Improve datapath and transport performance using XDP, eBPF, and protocol work aligned with IETF specifications. - Debug cross-layer issues with application teams (e.g., MTU behavior, cgroup memory accounting, packet filtering). - Develop and maintain kernel changes and Fastly kernel modules on a long-term kernel line; reduce private delta by upstreaming. - Ensure control-plane state pushed to eBPF/XDP programs is applied, verified, and safe to roll back. - Own kernel health in production: triage crashes/WARNs/regressions across the fleet, find root cause, and ship fixes. - Own and improve the kernel release process (CI, bake, canary, staged rollout/rollback) plus crash metrics and drift detection. - Participate in on-call rotation; lead kernel-side incident response and drive follow-up actions to closure. ## What We’re Looking For - 7+ years of related engineering experience, including substantial production C; 3+ years leading technical projects. - Production Linux kernel development experience, including debugging use-after-free, refcount, and leak bugs (e.g., KASAN, kdump, ftrace, perf, bpftrace). - Working knowledge of scheduler and memory management (EEVDF, memcg). - Experience managing a kernel patch stack and working with upstream communities. - Strong understanding of the Linux network stack (TCP/IP, sk_buff lifecycle, qdiscs, NIC drivers) and XDP/eBPF, with deep expertise in at least one area. - Operational discipline: staged rollouts, canaries, kill switches, observability, postmortems, and closing action items. - Understanding of distributed systems: control-plane/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 - Upstream kernel contributions or subsystem maintainership. - Deep transport protocol knowledge from IETF RFCs (e.g., QUIC, TCP, ECN, L4S, MASQUE). - Hardware enablement on AMD EPYC or Intel platforms; NIC drivers such as mlx5, ice, or i40e. - Load balancing / traffic steering systems. - CDN or large edge network environments. - Container networking (network namespaces, veth, cgroups) and eBPF-based CNI datapaths. --- ## Work Hours Requires availability during core business hours and participation in an on-call rotation. ## Work Location(s) & Travel - Open to **remote and hybrid** locations in the **United States**. - US office locations: **New York, NY; San Francisco, CA; Denver, CO**. - Travel may be required as needed for the role or requested by your manager. ## Salary - Estimated US range: **$211,370 – $253,644** - Starting salary may vary based on experience, skills, qualifications, and locati
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