Lead Cloud Networking Engineer

Role: Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Lead / Developer

Function: Engineering Networking & Infrastructure

Type: Full-time | Founding Engineering Team

Industry: AI infrastructure, Cloud computing

About Company

This role is with a rapidly growing AI infrastructure startup founded in 2025 in Bengaluru by a leadership team with deep product, cloud, and systems experience from global-scale tech companies. The company has built a GenAI-powered private cloud platform that automates and manages complex AI workloads across hybrid, on-prem, edge, and sovereign cloud environments designed for enterprise sectors where performance, data security, and compliance are critical. Backed by leading global VCs and prominent operators (approx. $10M seed raised), the company is recognized for strong engineering rigor and product clarity. Its platform focuses on AI-native orchestration, deep observability, and cost/performance optimization to help large enterprises deploy and scale AI with confidence. This is an opportunity to join early and shape the future of AI-first cloud infrastructure.

Position Overview

You design, build, and evolve the virtual networking fabric that underpins an autonomous, AI-ready cloud platform. You own multi-tenant Kubernetes networking, service-mesh integration, and policy-driven routing that keep GPU and data-intensive workloads humming across hybrid environments.

Role & Responsibilities

• Architect and implement software-defined networking stacks for virtualized, containerized, and bare-metal deployments.
• Develop Kubernetes CNI plugins and custom networking operators using tools such as Cilium, Calico, Multus, SR-IOV, and BGP/EVPN.
• Design multi-tenant network isolation, virtual overlays, VLAN/VXLAN/GRE tunnels, and cross-cluster connectivity.
• Implement programmable control planes with eBPF, gRPC, or REST to enable dynamic policy enforcement and routing.
• Integrate GPU and data-fabric awareness into the SDN layer to optimize east-west data flows and latency-sensitive workloads.
• Drive network observability, performance telemetry, and autonomous healing mechanisms through AI-driven NetOps.
• Contribute to open-source projects and help shape the future of AI-ready networking architectures.

Must have Criteria

• 48 years of hands-on experience in software-defined networking or network virtualization.
• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or Python for control-plane and data-plane development.
• Experience with Kubernetes networking (CNI, Calico, Cilium, Multus, Istio, Linkerd) and cloud-native architectures.
• Strong background in Linux networking internals, iptables/nftables, Netlink, and kernel-space versus user-space trade-offs.