Staff Software Engineer - Linux Kernel

Location: Remote or hybrid within the United States; offices in New York, San Francisco, and Denver. Core business hours and participation in an on-call rotation are required. Travel may be required.

Salary: $211,370–$253,644 per year, with potential equity and discretionary bonus eligibility.

Company

hirify.global provides an edge cloud platform for processing, serving, and securing applications close to end users.

What you will do

• Set technical direction for Linux kernel projects, own delivery from problem definition through fleet rollout, and mentor engineers.
• Enable new servers, CPUs, and network interfaces through drivers, interrupt affinity, RSS, and queue configuration.
• Improve datapath and transport performance using XDP, eBPF, Linux networking, and protocol work based on IETF specifications.
• Debug cross-layer production issues involving networking, memory accounting, packet filtering, and distributed-system state.
• Maintain hirify.global’s long-term kernel line, reduce private changes through upstreaming, and manage kernel releases, canaries, rollbacks, and observability.
• Triage crashes, warnings, regressions, and incidents across the fleet while driving corrective actions to completion.

Requirements

• 7+ years of related engineering experience, including substantial production C and at least 3 years leading technical projects.
• Production Linux kernel development experience, including debugging use-after-free, refcount, and memory leak issues with KASAN, kdump, ftrace, perf, or bpftrace.
• Knowledge of Linux scheduling and memory management, including EEVDF and memcg.
• Experience managing kernel patch stacks, working with upstream communities, and understanding the Linux network stack, XDP, or eBPF.
• Operational experience with staged rollouts, canaries, kill switches, observability, postmortems, and fleet-scale configuration safety.
• Ability to design broadly scoped work and drive it across teams, with an understanding of distributed-system consistency and partial failure.

Nice to have

• Upstream kernel contributions or subsystem maintainership.
• Experience with QUIC, TCP, ECN, L4S, or MASQUE based on IETF RFCs.
• Hardware enablement on AMD EPYC or Intel platforms and NIC drivers such as mlx5, ice, or i40e.
• Experience with load balancing, traffic steering, CDN or large edge networks, or container networking with eBPF-based CNI datapaths.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and accident insurance.
• Family planning support, mental health support, and an Employee Assistance Program.
• Flexible vacation, up to 18 days of accrued paid sick leave, 11 paid local holidays, and 12 paid company wellness days in 2026.
• 401(k) with company match and an Employee Stock Purchase Program.
• Inclusive and diverse workplace with support for open-source projects and employee causes.

Hiring process

• A fully completed application and resume or CV are required.