Senior Software Engineer — Rust Data Plane / Networking

About Buoyant

Buoyant is a privately held software company behind Linkerd, the CNCF-graduated Kubernetes service mesh, and Kinference, our Kubernetes-native AI inference solution.

We're expanding our engineering team and seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to build high-performance networking and data-plane software.

The Opportunity

This is a hands-on systems engineering role focused on developing production software that processes, proxies, forwards, routes, and otherwise handles live network traffic.

You'll work on performance-sensitive infrastructure involving service-to-service networking, distributed systems, concurrency, traffic management, security, and reliability.

Our engineering team builds the underlying software that powers production networking, rather than simply deploying or configuring existing tools.

Production Rust experience is strongly preferred. Exceptional engineers with deep professional C/C++ networking and systems programming experience who can transition to Rust are also encouraged to apply.

This is a software product engineering position, NOT a DevOps, SRE, Kubernetes administration, network operations, or general backend API development role.

You'll join an experienced engineering team, influence technical architecture, contribute to open-source infrastructure, and take substantial ownership of engineering work.

Location and Employment Requirements

Fully remote — United States, Canada, or South America.

At least five hours of daily overlap with Pacific Time business hours is required.

U.S. and Canadian applicants must already be authorized to work in their respective countries without employer immigration sponsorship, now or in the future.

South American candidates may be considered under company-approved employment or independent-contractor arrangements, subject to eligibility and approval.

Compensation includes competitive base salary or approved contractor compensation, as applicable, plus stock options subject to the applicable arrangement.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Buoyant is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate against applicants because of race, religion, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, military status, or any other characteristic protected by local law or ordinance.