# Staff Software Engineer - Linux Kernel at Fastly

- Company: Fastly
- What the company does: Backed by ICONIQ and Amplify.
- Company website: https://www.fastly.com/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Senior
- Location: Denver, CO; New York City, NY; San Francisco, CA
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $211K to $254K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-10-07
- Apply by: 2026-11-23
- Apply: https://www.fastly.com/about/jobs/apply?gh_jid=8261429&utm_source=1752vc&utm_medium=careers
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/fastly-staff-software-engineer-linux-kernel/

## About the role

Fastly's Kernel and Host Networking team builds and ships the Linux kernel that runs on every server in our global edge network, and every customer request passes through it. As a Staff engineer you own technical problems end to end: from a crash signature or a new NIC on the bench, through root cause and design, to a change that is upstreamed and safely running on thousands of servers. The work spans networking, XDP and eBPF, memory, performance and hardware enablement. It also spans layers. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.

## What they're looking for

- 7+ years of related engineering experience, including substantial production C, with 3 of those years leading technical projects
- Production Linux kernel development, including debugging use-after-free, refcount and leak bugs with KASAN, kdump, ftrace, perf or bpftrace
- Working knowledge of the scheduler and memory management (EEVDF, memcg)
- Experience managing a kernel patch stack and working with upstream communities
- Solid understanding of the Linux network stack (TCP/IP, sk_buff lifecycle, qdiscs, NIC drivers) and XDP or eBPF, with deep expertise in at least one of these areas
- Operational discipline: staged rollouts, canaries, kill switches, observability, postmortems and closing action items

Tags: Infrastructure Engineering

Source: 1752vc Careers, https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/fastly-staff-software-engineer-linux-kernel/