Senior Software Engineer, Network & Protocol Team (San Francisco, C.A)

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.

The Role

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.

What You'll Do And Own

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.

What You'll Bring

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 OpenWrt, Yocto, or Buildroot environments; familiarity with OTA frameworks, A / B partitioning, secure boot.

Nice to Have

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.

Tools & Tech You'll Touch

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

How We Work - Hoplynk's Values

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.

Seniority level

Mid-Senior level

Employment type

Full-time

Job function

Engineering and Information Technology

Industries

Technology, Information and Internet

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