Network Software Engineer Equity at First Round-backed AI cloud startup

Job Title

Network Software Engineer

$250K – $300K + 0.1% – 0.5% Equity

$7.3M Seed AI cloud infrastructure startup backed by First Round Capital

You will architect and build the networking foundation of the first AI‑native cloud from the ground up. This role involves designing an SDN fabric optimized for agentic AI workloads, utilizing Rust and Go to create a high‑performance VPC that surpasses traditional clouds in throughput, latency, and security enforcement.

San Francisco, USA

• You will design an entire networking architecture from scratch—including overlay networks and distributed routing—rather than simply maintaining legacy systems at a major provider.
• The company is backed by First Round Capital and led by founders who previously built and sold Europe's largest cloud infrastructure platform to OVHcloud.
• You will be building the infrastructure that already processes billions of requests for top AI startups, directly impacting the performance of the next generation of AI agents.

• Architect and implement a high‑performance dataplane for a custom VPC using VPP, DPDK, eBPF, XDP, and Rust.
• Build distributed control‑plane systems in Go and Rust for IPAM, L2/L3 routing, topology services, and ACL engines.
• Operate networking workloads on bare‑metal clusters with large‑scale IPv6‑only addressing while maintaining sub‑millisecond latency requirements.

• Has 3+ years of experience in systems engineering or distributed systems with strong proficiency in Rust and Go.
• Deeply understands networking internals, including IPv6, BGP/ECMP, and overlay technologies like VXLAN or Geneve.
• Possesses hands‑on experience with low‑level technologies such as DPDK, VPP, or eBPF to optimize cycles and cache locality.