Senior Engineering Manager, SDN Control Plane
$250,000–$300,000 year
On-siteSan Francisco, California, United States or Seattle, Washington, United States
Job Summary
Define the roadmap for the VPC control plane and lead the evolution of network virtualization systems delivering VPCs, subnets, security groups, and load balancing. Oversee the design of distributed control-plane services including intent APIs, state reconciliation, and southbound programming of hosts and DPUs. Lead reliability engineering, convergence benchmarking, and incident response to ensure operational excellence within 3-6 month cycles. Mentor a team of senior and staff-level engineers while partnering with data-plane and product teams to deliver low-latency networking for multi-tenant GPU clusters.
Required Qualifications
- At least 10+ years in distributed systems or cloud networking engineering
- 5-7+ years specifically managing senior/staff-level talent
- Deep 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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