Engineering Manager, SDN Control Plane
$215,000–$260,000 year
On-siteSan Francisco, California, United States or Seattle, Washington, United States
Job Summary
Lead the team building the scalable control plane for VPC networking, owning services that program multi-tenant virtual networks across large-scale GPU fleets. Define the roadmap for network virtualization systems delivering VPCs, subnets, security groups, load balancing, and NAT, while designing distributed control-plane services including intent APIs, state reconciliation, and southbound programming. Support reliability engineering, convergence benchmarking, and incident response within 3-6 month execution cycles, mentoring mid-level to senior engineers to foster a high-performance culture. Partner with data-plane and product teams to deliver low-latency, highly available networking for multi-tenant clusters, driving scalability beyond current fleet sizes.
Required Qualifications
- At least 6-8+ years in distributed systems or cloud networking engineering
- 2-4+ years specifically managing engineering talent
- Strong knowledge of SDN and network virtualization: overlay networking (VXLAN/Geneve), VPC constructs, routing (BGP/EVPN), and control-plane architectures such as OVN/OVS or equivalent
- Hands-on experience building large-scale control planes: state reconciliation, consensus and consistency trade-offs, API design, and fleet-wide configuration propagation (Go, Kubernetes-style controllers, or similar)
- A strong understanding of operating multi-tenant cloud services: SLOs, convergence-time and scale benchmarking, graceful degradation, and blast-radius containment
- The ability to resolve complex technical challenges in a fast-moving, execution-heavy environment
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with DPU/SmartNIC-programmed dataplanes
- Experience with cloud load balancing or NAT at scale
- Experience with network security policy engines
- Open-source contributions to OVN/OVS or SDN projects
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