eBay · 2 weeks ago
Staff Software Eng, Kernel Network
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
$190K/yr - $254K/yr
10+ years expeBay is a global ecommerce leader, committed to changing the way the world shops and sells. The Staff Software Engineer will lead the design and implementation of high-performance data planes and visibility tooling, focusing on the reliability, performance, and security of network traffic across eBay's infrastructure.
AuctionsE-CommerceInternetMarketplaceRetail
Responsibilities
Design, implement, and optimize kernel-level networking components (TCP/UDP, QUIC, congestion control, sockets, netfilter, XDP/AF_XDP, eBPF) for high-scale production environments
Build and evolve data planes for L4/L7 traffic management, including load balancers, proxies, NAT, firewalling, rate limiting, and traffic shaping
Develop robust observability for the networking stack: eBPF-based telemetry, tracing, packet capture, flow logs, performance counters, and SLO/SLA instrumentation
Lead initiatives to reduce tail latency, improve throughput, and decrease resource utilization via kernel/userspace tuning, scheduling, NUMA/IRQ affinity, offloads, and memory management
Architect and deploy scalable traffic systems across multi-region, multi-tenant environments with zero-downtime rollouts and rapid incident recovery
Partner with SRE, Security, and Platform teams on traffic policy, DDoS mitigation, TLS/PKI, and compliance requirements
Drive roadmap, technical strategy, and cross-functional execution; provide technical leadership and mentorship to the team
Conduct rigorous benchmarking and capacity planning; define performance baselines and regression gates
Own production health: participate in on-call rotations, root-cause analysis, and corrective action plans
Qualification
Required
10+ years of software engineering, with significant experience in Linux kernel networking and high-performance systems
Expert-level knowledge of kernel networking subsystems: sockets, TCP/IP stack, routing, netfilter/iptables/nftables, XDP/AF_XDP, eBPF
Strong systems programming skills in C/C++ and familiarity with Rust or Go for userspace components
Proven experience building and operating large-scale traffic systems (load balancers, proxies, packet processors) in production
Hands-on expertise with observability: metrics, logs, tracing, eBPF probes, perf/tracepoints, tcpdump, pcaps, and performance analysis tools
Deep understanding of performance tuning: NIC offloads, DPDK or kernel-bypass techniques, IRQ/queue management, NUMA, memory allocators, lock contention, and scheduler behavior
Solid knowledge of L4/L7 protocols (TCP, QUIC, TLS, HTTP/2/3), congestion control, and transport/security internals
Experience with cloud or bare-metal environments, container orchestration (Kubernetes), service discovery, and service mesh patterns
Strong debugging skills across kernel/userspace boundaries; ability to analyze crashes, deadlocks, and performance pathologies
Preferred
Contributions to Linux kernel, eBPF tools, or relevant open source projects (Cilium, Envoy, NGINX, HAProxy, Calico, DPDK)
Experience with programmable data planes, SRv6, BGP/ECMP, anycast, and multi-cluster traffic routing
Background in security for networking stacks: firewalling, ACLs, mTLS, DDoS detection/mitigation, bot defense
Experience building self-service traffic platforms and developer-facing APIs/SDKs
Knowledge of hardware acceleration: SmartNICs, ASICs, FPGA-based offload, and NIC telemetry
Experience with time synchronization and precision timing (PTP), clocking, and its impact on networking performance
Benefits
Target bonus
Restricted stock units
Full range of medical
Financial
401(k) eligibility
Various paid time off benefits
PTO
Parental leave
Company
eBay
eBay is a global online marketplace enabling users to buy, sell, and auction new or used items across various categories.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
eBay has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (572)
2024 (883)
2023 (779)
2022 (682)
2021 (748)
2020 (766)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$1.16BKey Investors
Benchmark
2022-11-07Post Ipo Debt· $1.15B
1998-09-24IPO
1998-01-01Series Unknown
Leadership Team
Jamie Iannone
CEO
Alex Kazim
VP, GM eBay Services
Recent News
2026-01-09
Digital Commerce 360
2026-01-07
Company data provided by crunchbase