Senior Software Engineer, Network & Protocol Team; San Francisco, C.

Senior Software Engineer, Network & Protocol Team (San Francisco,

C.A)

Join Hoplynk as the senior networking lead and a founding engineer. Your mission: set the architecture and deliver a production‑grade multipath networking stack on Linux.

You’ll drive the technical roadmap from kernel and policy management to observability and QoS optimization; mentor the team; and turn user feedback into measurable improvements.

• Define the end‑to‑end system architecture, including routing/transport policies, subflow management, and failover.
• Establish SLOs (latency, loss, failover time, goodput) and build comprehensive monitoring systems.
• Lead design reviews, RFCs, and implementation plans across kernel/user space (iproute2, netlink, tc, eBPF/XDP, mptcpd).
• Design and run experiments with QEMU and other network simulation services.
• Partner with our embedded systems team on BSP, drivers, OTA/rollback, and device observability.
• Support deployments: capture traces, triage issues across layers, tune policies, and manage the release process as we scale customers.
• Mentor engineers, raise standards for documentation and reliability, and help hire the early networking team.

• Routing & Policy:
  Strong familiarity with writing low level code in Rust; familiarity with queue management and load balancing optimization algorithms; deep knowledge of Linux routing stacks and familiarity with DPDK, eBPF, or custom datapath acceleration.
• Transport & Multipath:
  Strong understanding of TCP, QUIC/MP‑QUIC, and MPTCP protocols; ability to prototype, simulate, and validate transport behavior under real‑world conditions.
• Telemetry & Observability:
  Hands‑on experience with network instrumentation and metrics; experience with perf, ftrace, and streaming telemetry pipelines.
• Leadership &
  
  Collaboration:
  
  Mentorship, clear documentation, and ability to bridge firmware, kernel, and cloud domains.
• Embedded & Security:
  Experience with Open Wrt, Yocto, or Buildroot environments; familiarity with OTA frameworks, A/B partitioning, secure boot.

• Familiarity with cellular modems, multi‑SIM bonding, and adaptive path selection across ISPs for latency and privacy.
• Awareness of traffic fingerprinting and obfuscation techniques; experience designing overlay networks or tunnel obfuscation layers.
• Strong understanding of network encryption, key management, and secure channel establishment.
• Ability to interpret hardware schematics, understand PHY bring‑up, or debug low‑level Ethernet/Wi‑Fi/5G link issues.
• Experience deploying communications or networking systems in robotics, autonomy, or rugged edge environments where RF and multipath conditions vary drastically.

Linux 6.x, MPTCP, Open Wrt/Debian/Ubuntu, iproute2/netlink, mptcpd, perf/ftrace, Rust/C++/Python.

• Candor:
  Say the hard thing kindly, early, and with evidence.
• Humility:
  Strong opinions, loosely held. Teach and learn in the open.
• Initiative:
  Run toward the smoke. Own problems end‑to‑end.

Mid‑Senior level

Full‑time

Engineering and Information Technology

Technology, Information and Internet

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