Software Engineer

Dive in and do the best work of your career at DigitalOcean. Journey alongside a strong community of top talent who are relentless in their drive to build the simplest scalable cloud. If you have a growth mindset, naturally like to think big and bold, and are energized by the fast-paced environment of a true industry disruptor, you’ll find your place here.  We value winning together—while learning, having fun, and making a profound difference for the dreamers and builders in the world. 

About the Role

DigitalOcean is looking for a Senior Software Engineer, Network Datapath to help build and evolve the software that powers high-performance networking across our cloud infrastructure.

You will work at the intersection of networking, operating systems, distributed systems, and high-performance software, developing datapath technologies that enable DigitalOcean to deliver high throughput, low latency, and predictable network performance at scale.

This role will focus on the software running in and around the network datapath, including packet processing, forwarding, routing, acceleration, observability, and integration with host and hardware-based networking components. You will work closely with Network Infrastructure, Compute, Availability, and hardware teams to design, implement, optimize, and operate production networking systems.

The ideal candidate is a strong software engineer with deep networking knowledge who enjoys working close to the system and is excited about optimizing the path that packets take through cloud infrastructure.

What You'll Be Doing

• Design, develop, and optimize high-performance network datapath software for DigitalOcean's cloud infrastructure.
• Build and improve packet-processing and forwarding systems with a focus on throughput, latency, CPU efficiency, scalability, and reliability.
• Develop networking functionality across the host, kernel, user space, and hardware-accelerated datapath.
• Work with technologies such as Linux networking, eBPF, XDP, DPDK, AF_XDP, SR-IOV, and programmable datapaths.
• Analyze packet-processing paths and identify opportunities to eliminate bottlenecks and improve performance.
• Develop software for routing, packet filtering, encapsulation, tunneling, load balancing, traffic steering, and network virtualization.
• Build and improve datapath observability, telemetry, debugging, and performance monitoring.
• Design software that integrates with DPUs, SmartNICs, programmable NICs, and other hardware acceleration technologies.
• Develop automated testing and benchmarking frameworks to validate datapath correctness and performance.