Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly’s edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers’ applications as close to their end-users as possible — at the edge of the Internet. The platform is designed to take advantage of the up-to-date internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development.

Fastly’s customers include many of the world’s most prominent companies, including GitHub, Yelp, Paramount, and JetBlue. We’re building a more trustworthy Internet.

Posting Open Date: Anticipated Posting Close Date*: Job posting may close early due to the volume of applicants.

Staff Software

Engineer, Linux Edge Kernel

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. Our kernel is the datapath of a distributed system whose control planes are constantly pushing new state to the fleet, so staying correct under change is part of the job. Set technical direction for kernel projects, own them end to end from problem statement to fleet rollout, and mentor engineers on the team Take new servers, CPUs and NICs from first boot to full fleet: drivers, IRQ affinity, RSS and queue layout on high core count hosts Improve datapath and transport performance with XDP, eBPF and protocol work based on IETF specifications Develop and maintain kernel changes and Fastly kernel modules on our long term kernel line, and reduce our private delta by upstreaming Make sure state pushed from control planes to eBPF and XDP programs is applied,



verified and safe to roll back Own kernel health in production: triage crashes, WARNs and regressions across the fleet, find the root cause and ship the fix Own and improve the kernel release process and the signals behind it: CI, bake, canary, staged rollout and rollback across thousands of servers, plus crash metrics and drift detection that fire before customers notice Join the on-call rotation, lead the kernel side of incidents and drive follow-up actions to closure 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 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 Understanding of distributed systems: control plane and datapath consistency, partial failure and safe config rollout at fleet scale We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these: CDN or large edge network environments Container networking: network namespaces, veth, cgroups, and eBPF-based CNI datapaths This position requires availability during core business hours and participation in an on-call rotation.

Work Location(s) & Travel Requirements:

This position is open to remote and hybrid work locations in the United States.



This position may require travel as required by your role or requested by your manager. This role may be eligible to participate in Fastly’s equity and discretionary bonus programs.

We offer a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance. Family planning, mental health support along with Employee Assistance Program, Insurance (Life, Disability, and Accident), a Flexible Vacation policy and up to 18 days of accrued paid sick leave are there to help support our employees. For 2026, we offer 11 paid local holidays, 12 paid company wellness days.

Not only do our customers have a tremendous user base, but we also support a growing number of open source projects and initiatives. Outside of code, employees are encouraged to share causes close to their heart with others so we can help lend a supportive hand. We value diversity.

Fastly employs authors, pilots, skiers, parents (of humans and animals), makeup geeks, coffee connoisseurs, and more. All job applications must be submitted through our official careers site at We will never request sensitive information, such as your Social Security number, bank account or credit card information during the application process. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, family or parental status, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.

Consistent with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and federal or state disability laws, Fastly will provide reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. Fastly collects and processes personal data submitted by job applicants in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

📌 Staff Software Engineer - Linux Kernel (Picton)
🏢 Fastly
📍 Picton