Network Software Engineer

About the role

We're looking for a world-class Network Software Engineer to architect and build the networking foundation of the first AI-native cloud. You'll design and implement the full virtual networking stack for Blaxel's VPC-our next-generation SDN fabric optimized for agentic AI workloads. Your work will span ultra-high-performance dataplane systems (VPP, DPDK, eBPF) and the distributed control-plane and traffic services written in Rust and Go . You'll also expand our globally distributed networking suite-including our Rust-based load balancer , Rust HTTP proxies , traffic routing systems, and data plane components that already process 1.5M+ requests daily . Your mission: build a VPC that surpasses traditional clouds by an order of magnitude in throughput, latency, visibility, and security enforcement. If you're a systems-focused engineer who loves Rust, Go, networking internals, and building cloud primitives from scratch, this role is for you.

Responsibilities

• You'll collaborate closely with founders and infrastructure teams to design, build, and operate Blaxel's end-to-end SDN stack.
• Architect and implement the high-performance dataplane for Blaxel's VPC using VPP, DPDK, eBPF, XDP, and Rust.
• Build and extend distributed control-plane systems in Go and Rust : IPAM, L2/L3 routing, topology services, ACL engines, NAT, VPC abstractions.
• Develop Rust microservices running at extreme performance envelopes-sub-millisecond latency, multi-million flow tables, multi-Gbps throughput.
• Extend our Rust load balancer and Rust HTTP proxies to support worldwide deployment and growing request volumes.
• Operate networking workloads on bare-metal clusters with large-scale IPv6-only addressing.
• Build testing, simulation, and benchmarking frameworks for both control-plane and dataplane components.
• Instrument networking systems with deep observability: metrics, flows, packet traces, latency profiles.
• Debug and resolve complex networking issues across layers L2-L7.
• Partner with compute, storage stakeholders to design cross-stack performance and reliability guarantees.
• Continuously evolve the networking strategy, introducing new primitives optimized for AI-native traffic patterns.

Requirements

• Systems-driven engineer: You understand concurrency, memory, CPU profiles, and low-level networking behavior.
• Rust and/or Go engineer: You're strong in Rust, Go, or both-and want to engineer high-performance distributed systems.
• Networking-fluent: You deeply understand packets, queues, routing, overlays, firewalls, and how networks behave under stress.
• Performance obsessed: You think in terms of cycles, cache locality, tail latencies, NUMA effects, and throughput curves.
• Zero-to-one builder: You thrive in environments where you invent the primitives, not glue together existing ones.
• High ownership: You want to design systems from idea → architecture → implementation → deployment → operations.
• Required skills
• 3+ years in systems engineering, distributed systems, networking, or infrastructure software roles
• Strong proficiency in Rust , Go , or both (with willingness to work in both)
• Experience with SDN or cloud networking systems (VPCs, virtual routers, SDN controllers, overlay networks)
• Strong understanding of IPv6 , routing (BGP/ECMP), and common overlay technologies (e.g., VXLAN/Geneve)
• Hands-on experience with DPDK, VPP, eBPF, or XDP
• Strong debugging skills across distributed systems and multi-layer networking
• Preferred
• Experience building high-performance proxies, L4/L7 load balancers, or edge networking components
• Experience building or operating multi-tenant cloud networking systems
• Familiarity with distributed systems fundamentals (consensus, sharding, leader election, etc.)
• Experience with traffic engineering or global traffic routing
• Security background in network isolation, segmentation, or zero-trust architectures
• Bonus
• Experience with any of the following is a plus:
• Kernel bypass / SmartNIC / SR-IOV / RDMA
• Custom BPF programs for observability or dataplane filtering
• Large-scale IPv6-only environments
• Advanced traffic simulation or network modeling
• Ultra-low-latency performance tuning
• Cloud provider networking (AWS VPC, GCP VPC, Azure VNet internals)
• About Blaxel
• Blaxel is AWS for AI agents. We're building a new kind of cloud optimized for agentic AI-powered by a purpose-built 25ms cold-start serverless compute engine.
• We process billions of AI agent requests and power the production infrastructure for top AI startups. Traditional clouds weren't built for agentic workloads-we're solving the performance, reliability, and stateful execution challenges they can't.
• We recently raised a $7.3M seed round led by First Round Capital.

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