Senior Software Engineer — Rust Data Plane / Networking

Fully Remote — United States, Canada, or South America ONLY
Experience: 7+ years

IMPORTANT — Please Read Before Applying

We are seeking experienced systems engineers who have personally designed, implemented, and debugged production networking software that processes, proxies, forwards, routes, or otherwise handles live network traffic.

Production Rust experience is strongly preferred. Exceptional engineers with deep professional C/C++ networking and systems programming experience who can become productive in Rust are also encouraged to apply.

This is a hands-on systems and networking software engineering position — NOT a DevOps, SRE, Kubernetes administration, network operations, or general backend API development role.

Applicants must currently reside in the United States, Canada, or South America. Applications from other regions will not be considered for this posting.

About Buoyant

Buoyant is a privately held, profitable software company and the creator of Linkerd, the CNCF-graduated Kubernetes service mesh used in production environments around the world.

Our engineering team builds the high-performance Rust-based proxy and traffic-handling software behind Linkerd and Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd.

We're expanding our engineering organization and seeking experienced systems developers who want to solve difficult networking, concurrency, performance, and distributed-systems challenges.

You'll work alongside a small, highly experienced engineering team, contribute to production open-source infrastructure, influence technical decisions, and own substantial engineering work.

What You'll Do

• Design, implement, test, and maintain performance-sensitive Rust networking software, including the Linkerd proxy and related data-plane components.
• Work directly with live L4/L7 network traffic, including TCP, HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, and gRPC.
• Develop proxy capabilities involving connection management, load balancing, routing, retries, timeouts, backpressure, and graceful failure handling.
• Diagnose difficult Linux networking, protocol, concurrency, and distributed-systems problems.
• Optimize latency, throughput, memory usage, and CPU efficiency through profiling, benchmarking, and performance analysis.
• Build reliable, secure service-to-service communication infrastructure.
• Own software components from technical design through implementation, testing, production debugging, and maintenance.
• Contribute to open-source Linkerd engineering, design reviews, and technical documentation.

Required Qualifications — Must Have

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building production systems software, networking products, distributed infrastructure, or performance-sensitive backend systems.
• Direct hands-on development of production networking or data-plane software that processes, forwards, proxies, routes, or otherwise handles live network traffic.
• Strong practical knowledge of TCP/IP, sockets, connection lifecycles, and HTTP protocols, including production networking troubleshooting.
• Performance-critical engineering experience optimizing throughput, latency, concurrency, memory, or CPU efficiency.
• Strong professional systems programming in Rust OR deep production C/C++ networking/systems development, with the demonstrated ability and motivation to work in Rust.
• Experience implementing and debugging distributed systems, including partial failures, timeouts, and resource constraints.
• Demonstrated ownership of substantial software components from design through production.
• Strong written and verbal communication and the ability to work independently on a fully remote engineering team.

Important: Production Rust is strongly preferred, but Rust and C/C++ are NOT both required. Deep C/C++ networking engineers capable of transitioning to Rust are welcome.

Highly Desirable Experience

• Production asynchronous Rust development, especially Tokio.
• Hands-on development of L4/L7 proxies, reverse proxies, load balancers, network gateways, packet-processing systems, or service-mesh data planes.
• HTTP/2, gRPC, TLS/mTLS, connection pooling, flow control, and backpressure.
• Linux networking internals, eBPF/XDP, DPDK, and kernel/user-space networking.
• Performance profiling, benchmarking, tail-latency optimization, and concurrency debugging.
• Hands-on development involving Envoy, Linkerd, Istio, or NGINX internals.
• Kubernetes networking, service discovery, open-source infrastructure, and security-focused engineering.

What Does NOT Qualify on Its Own

The following experience is insufficient without substantial hands-on networking or data-plane software development:

• Deploying, configuring, or operating Linkerd, Envoy, Istio, NGINX, or load balancers without developing the underlying traffic-processing software.
• Kubernetes administration, Helm, Terraform, CI/CD, or infrastructure monitoring.
• Building ordinary REST APIs, CRUD microservices, or web applications without significant systems-level networking development.
• Rust hobby projects without substantial professional Rust or C/C++ systems/networking experience.
• General Go backend engineering without ownership of networking, proxy, or live traffic-processing software.

We need engineers who BUILD the networking software that handles production traffic — not engineers who simply DEPLOY or OPERATE it.

Prior Linkerd experience is not required.

Location and Employment Requirements

Eligible locations: United States, Canada, or South America ONLY.

This is a fully remote position requiring at least five hours of daily overlap with Pacific Time business hours.

U.S. and Canadian candidates must already have work authorization in their respective countries without employer immigration sponsorship, now or in the future.

South American candidates may be considered under company-approved employment or independent-contractor arrangements, subject to eligibility and approval.

How to Apply

Click the Apply button to complete our brief application form and upload your resume.

We're specifically looking for engineers who have personally developed production networking or data-plane software that handles live network traffic.

Applicants must currently reside in the United States, Canada, or South America.

The application takes approximately 2–3 minutes to complete.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Buoyant is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate against applicants because of race, religion, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, military status, or any other characteristic protected by local law or ordinance.