The role
From Nvidia's own posting.
We are looking for a Principal System Software Engineer, Software Defined Networking to design, build, and operate highly performant and scalable SDN solutions for NVIDIA's AI Clouds hosting GPU-accelerated workloads — including hyperscale multi-node training, inference, cloud gaming, and cloud functions. This role spans the full lifecycle of our SDN stack — from designing and developing new control and data plane software to ensuring operational excellence in production through reliability engineering, CI/CD, observability, and incident response.
What you'll be doing:
Design and develop next-generation multi-tenant cloud SDN control and data plane software (OVS, OVN, OpenFlow)
Build Infrastructure-as-a-Service virtual network orchestration and services using gRPC and REST to support tenant workload security and performance SLAs for BMaaS, VMaaS, and Kubernetes
Drive upstream contributions to OVN-Kubernetes and related open-source projects
Develop software for network observability — monitoring, telemetry, intelligent metering, and performance analysis
Operate and support OVS-OVN based SDN solutions in large-scale NVIDIA AI Cloud environments
Own end-to-end observability for the SDN stack — build and maintain monitoring, alerting, distributed tracing, and dashboarding to ensure real-time insight into network health, performance, and tenant SLAs
Design, enhance, and maintain CI/CD pipelines (GitLab) across Linux host networking, OVS, OVN, and Kubernetes CNIs
Implement GitOps approaches or related experience for secure, seamless integration with cloud infrastructure
Collaborate with SRE, DevOps, and network engineering teams on production readiness and operational tooling
What we need to see:
BS/MS in Computer Science or related technical field, or a comparable blend of education and relevant experience
15+ years of proven experience in software development for large-scale distributed environments
Expert-level knowledge of OVN, OVS, OpenFlow, and modern network protocols
Strong programming skills in C and Go; advanced scripting in Bash and Python
Deep knowledge of Kubernetes, practical experience deploying and supporting CNIs (OVN-Kubernetes)
Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and deployment tools (Ansible, Terraform, ArgoCD, Flux)
Experience designing and operating complex, multi-stage CI/CD pipelines
Hands-on experience developing secure, high-performance services using gRPC and REST with TLS and strong authentication
Strong knowledge of datacenter routing, switching, and Linux host/VM networking
Ways to stand out from the crowd:
Contributions to open-source projects (especially OVS, OVN, OVN-Kubernetes, or other Kubernetes networking projects)
Experience with hardware acceleration (GPU, DPU or equivalent experience) for networking
Practical experience with major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and hybrid/multi-cloud deployments
SRE/DevOps top-level expertise — on-call, incident management, operations focused on service reliability targets, production ownership
Experience with observability platforms and tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, ELK)