Senior System Software Engineer, Software Defined Networking
NVIDIA is hiring a Senior System Software Engineer, Software Defined Networking in Bengaluru, India. Level rates it ; you can apply on NVIDIA.
Level's read on this job
- Little AI ●○○○ is how Level rates this software engineer role: aI is not part of the work.
- The posting mentions Ovs, Ovn and Openflow among its tools and skills.
- Level classes it as a senior role.
- NVIDIA has 1,800+ other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Design and build software-defined networking solutions for high-performance AI cloud environments hosting GPU workloads.
We are looking for a Senior 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; Drive reliability through incident management, resource monitoring, and performance tuning
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
5+ 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)
How we rate this
Senior System Software Engineer, Software Defined Networking at NVIDIA rates 20 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Little AI. AI is not part of the work.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting doesn't list pay. Use the typical software engineer figure when pay comes up. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where networking was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where sdn was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where ci/cd was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where observability was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Networking, Sdn, Distributed Systems, CI/CD, and Observability. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
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