Software Engineer, Traffic Infrastructure

Description

The Cloud Infrastructure team builds and runs the infrastructure behind the company's products, including ChatGPT and the API. Inside it, the Traffic team handles how traffic enters the cloud environments, moves between services, clusters and regions, and reaches external dependencies.

The team works on cloud networking, Kubernetes networking, ingress and egress gateways, proxies, load balancing and traffic steering. The aim is paths that are reliable, secure and efficient, with tooling and observability that other engineering teams can use with ease.

The role builds and runs the networking and traffic layer connecting the company's products and services across clouds and regions. The work covers L3, L4 and L7, from IP connectivity, NAT and transport behaviour up to service proxies and application request routing.

You should have deep knowledge of one part of this stack and a real interest in how the full path behaves. Typical projects include gateways and control planes, cross-region connectivity, diagnosing packet loss or connection exhaustion, and making routing changes safer to operate.

The role mixes software engineering with owning systems in production. You will turn unclear networking problems into lasting fixes, working with service owners, infrastructure teams, Security and cloud providers.

Based in San Francisco, CA or Seattle, WA.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and run ingress, egress and service-to-service connectivity across clusters, regions and clouds.
• Build proxies, gateways, controllers and automation for routing, load balancing, failover and traffic management.
• Build and develop cloud networking, including private connectivity, NAT and network isolation.
• Find the cause of failures and slow paths across application, proxy, transport and cloud networking layers, and work with cloud providers when the fault sits in their infrastructure.
• Create telemetry and diagnostic tools that show traffic paths, pinpoint failing components and help engineers act.
• Work with Security to build and verify protections for traffic paths, such as secure service communication, access controls, egress restrictions and DDoS defences.
• Improve latency, throughput, availability and efficiency through measurement, testing and careful production rollouts.
• Give service teams clear interfaces and safe defaults, take part in on-call, and turn incident lessons into changes that stop repeat failures and cut manual work.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building production infrastructure or distributed systems, including substantial networking or traffic work.
• Depth in one or more areas such as cloud networking, Kubernetes networking, proxies and gateways, service meshes, load balancing or global traffic routing.
• A solid grasp of networking fundamentals, and the ability to reason about how IP routing, TCP/UDP, DNS, NAT, TLS and HTTP/gRPC affect connectivity and performance.
• Hands-on experience building or running systems such as Envoy, NGINX, Istio, Cilium or similar networking infrastructure.
• Experience writing production software in Go, Rust, C++, Python or a similar language, and using software and automation to fix operational problems.
• Ability to investigate unfamiliar failures with evidence, test hypotheses and carry problems through to a confirmed fix.
• Ownership of design, implementation, rollout and ongoing reliability, with clear communication across teams when a problem crosses ownership lines.
• A care for keeping infrastructure secure and easy to understand for the engineers who rely on it.
• Prior experience with every technology or networking layer listed is not required. The team values deep expertise and a willingness to learn across boundaries.

Conditions

Based in San Francisco, CA or Seattle, WA.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any legally protected characteristic.