Buoyant, the company behind Linkerd, is hiring a Linkerd Data Plane Engineer to build the Rust-based data plane behind Linkerd, the CNCF-graduated service mesh used in production Kubernetes environments around the world.

This is a deeply hands-on systems engineering role focused on high-performance proxy and networking software that sits directly in the live traffic path. The work spans networking, distributed systems, Linux, performance, reliability, and production debugging.

This is not a DevOps, SRE, or adjacent platform role. It is a true data-plane build role for engineers who enjoy performance-sensitive systems, network protocols, proxies, and low-level infrastructure software.

The role is fully remote based in United States or Canada and can be scoped at the Senior, Staff, or Principal level depending on background.

Design and build high-performance data plane systems that handle live L4/L7 traffic, including TCP, HTTP/1.x, HTTP/2, and gRPC.

Improve latency, throughput, reliability, and resource efficiency in performance-sensitive systems.

Debug complex networking and distributed systems issues in real production Kubernetes environments.

Work on proxy, traffic-handling, and systems-level infrastructure that sits directly in the request path.

Help shape the evolution of the Linkerd data plane and contribute to both Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd and the broader Linkerd ecosystem.

Collaborate with a remote, highly technical, writing-driven engineering team.

Strong experience building systems-level, performance-sensitive software.

Deep understanding of Linux systems and networking fundamentals.

Strong TCP/IP and network protocol experience.

Experience with proxies, load balancers, packet processing systems, service mesh data planes, or adjacent traffic-handling infrastructure.

Experience debugging and optimizing distributed systems in production.

Rust experience is strongly preferred.

Strong C or C++ engineers with deep networking, proxy, or systems experience who want to work in Rust are also of strong interest.

Go experience is a plus.

Helpful but not required: Linkerd, Envoy, Istio, Kubernetes, eBPF, DPDK, kernel networking, observability tooling, mTLS, HTTP/2, and gRPC.

Strong written communication, low-ego collaboration, pragmatism, and comfort with ownership and ambiguity in a fully remote environment.

To express interest or refer someone, please contact Scott Deakin directly at scott@prcaz.com

Company description: Buoyant is the company behind Linkerd, the open-source Kubernetes service mesh. Buoyant helps engineering teams run secure, reliable cloud-native infrastructure by providing Linkerd-based service mesh software, support, and expertise for Kubernetes environments.