Networking Operating System Firmware Engineer
Develops and maintains custom networking operating system firmware for AI supercomputers, integrating Linux kernel, switch ASICs, and control-plane services. Requires deep expertise in SONiC, SAI, routing protocols, and platform bring-up across hardware and software boundaries.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and maintain custom NOS images for large-scale AI fabrics, using open source components from SONiC, FRR, and related networking stacks.
- Integrate, build and configure Linux kernel components, device drivers, switch ASIC SDKs, and SAI layers.
- Bring up new switch platforms, including thermal and fan control, power monitoring, transceiver management, watchdogs, OSFP CMIS, LEDs, CPLDs, and board-specific platform logic.
- Extend and customize NOS services for routing, telemetry, control-plane state, and distributed automation.
- Implement and debug route, neighbor, next-hop, and ECMP programming flows from control-plane intent through ASIC hardware state.
- Build software mechanisms that distinguish control-plane acceptance, SAI/SDK acceptance, and explicit hardware programming acknowledgement.
- Work with hardware teams to validate ASIC configurations, link bring-up, SerDes tuning, buffer profiles, and performance baselines.
- Evaluate switch silicon SDK releases, track vendor deliverables, and validate platform requirements with vendors and ASIC partners.
- Debug complex issues spanning kernel drivers, platform monitoring, NOS services, routing agents, orchestration services, hardware signals, ASIC state, and network topology.
- Integrate switches into fleet-wide monitoring, remote diagnostics, telemetry pipelines, and automated lifecycle workflows.
- Develop robust CI/CD pipelines for reproducible NOS builds and controlled rollout across the fleet.
- Support factory bring-up and qualification all the way through mass deployment.
- Collaborate on networking protocols and technologies that improve performance and reliability at AI factory scale.
Requirements
- Proven experience working with SONiC or comparable NOS stacks such as FBOSS, Cumulus Linux, Arista EOS, Junos PFE-level integration, or equivalent platform software.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals: clear interfaces, data models, state-machine design, error handling, testing, observability, performance debugging, and maintainable C/C++, Python, Go or Rust code.
- Experience with Linux kernel internals, network device drivers, platform drivers, hwmon, I2C/SMBus, CPLDs, or board-level platform software.
- Experience integrating or debugging Broadcom, Marvell, NVIDIA, Intel, or comparable switch ASIC SDKs and SAI implementations.
- Understanding of L2/L3 forwarding, ECMP, RoCE, BGP, QoS, PFC, buffer tuning, and telemetry.
- Experience with platform bring-up and board-level debugging across thermal, fan, power, transceiver, LED, watchdog, CPLD, or OSFP CMIS flows.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with OpenConfig gNMI interfaces, YANG data models, or structured telemetry.
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, distributed config and state management, reproducible builds, and large-scale automation.
- Ability to independently drive ambiguous NOS or platform feature development from problem definition through implementation, validation, rollout, and debugging across software, hardware, and vendor boundaries.
- Familiarity with Rust or Go.
Skills
Sonic, Sai, Linux Kernel, Asic Sdks, Frr, C/C++, Python, Go, Rust, BGP, Ecmp, Roce, Openconfig, Yang, CI/CD
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