Software Engineer, Network Infrastructure
ABOUT THE ROLE
Render's mission is to eliminate the undifferentiated work that goes into building software products by offering an easy-to-use, powerful cloud platform for developer teams of all sizes.
We are scaling rapidly. Our customers have created hundreds of thousands of services on our platform, and the numbers continue to accelerate. Our customers trust us to deliver a secure, reliable and performant cloud — this is our top priority as a company.
By joining us at an early stage, you will design and build the cloud platform you've always wanted for yourself, and make decisions that will shape our product and company, directly impacting developers around the globe.
Render builds and operates our own networking stack end-to-end. We leverage open source and industry-standard technologies, modifying and extending the core components to meet the unique reliability, performance, and scaling demands of our platform.
We are looking for engineers with deep specialization in network infrastructure, particularly with experience in edge/ingress networking and Kubernetes networking internals.
Areas of focus include scaling and evolving our traffic routing and load balancing systems; advancing Kubernetes and Linux networking components to support large-scale, zero-downtime operation; and exploring networking for Render’s next-generation compute platforms.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Own Render's core network infrastructure across multiple data centers and cloud providers. Shape how networking evolves as Render rapidly scales.
- Design and build customer-facing networking capabilities that give users greater flexibility in how their services connect, communicate, and how traffic is routed.
- Investigate complex networking issues across the stack, from the kernel and data plane to distributed systems and edge networking.
- Drive performance and reliability improvements through systematic profiling and tuning.
- Partner with engineers across the company to build a platform that is stable, predictable, and secure.
- Participate in our on-call rotation. Help continuously improve how we detect, respond to, and learn from incidents.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- At least 6 years of experience building and operating large-scale networking or infrastructure systems.
- Experience with Kubernetes networking internals (e.g. kube-proxy, CNI plugins, service routing) or similar container networking technology.
- Experience with Linux networking internals (e.g. routing, netfilter/iptables/nftables, conntrack) in production environments.
- Experience building and operating traffic routing systems (e.g. load balancers, ingress, proxies) at scale.
- Strong experience designing, debugging, and operating distributed systems.
- Experience planning and executing high-risk changes with minimal downtime.
NICE-TO-HAVES
- Experience with eBPF or advanced Linux kernel networking.
- Experience developing systems in Go or similar languages that interact with low-level OS and networking primitives.
RELEVANT LINKS FROM THE RENDER ENGINEERING TEAM
- The Namespaces Scaling Trap https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCKhoYsNsmE (video podcast interview) and related article How We Found 7 TiB of Memory Just Sitting Around https://render.com/blog/how-we-found-7-tib-of-memory-just-sitting-around
- SEV0 SF 2025 | Boundary Cases: Technical and social challenges in cross-system debugging https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4hAyzmBNXk
- Distributing Global State to Serve over 1 Billion Daily Requests https://render.com/blog/distributing-global-state-to-serve-over-1-billion-daily-requests
- Breaking down OpenAI's outage: How to avoid a hidden DNS dependency in Kubernetes https://render.com/blog/a-hidden-dns-dependency-in-kubernetes
- Kubernetes Informers are so easy... to misuse! https://render.com/blog/kubernetes-informers