Senior DPDK / Systems Engineer

We are hiring a Senior DPDK / Systems Engineer for a Canadian product startup building a carrier grade network intelligence platform.

The company develops a high performance deep packet inspection and traffic classification engine used in security, intelligence, and telecom environments. The core system processes network traffic at extremely high throughput with strict latency requirements and is designed for continuous operation in carrier grade infrastructures.

The product is a low level, performance critical system built around DPDK and modern systems programming practices. It operates at line rate speeds, processes tens of millions of concurrent flows, and performs deep L7 inspection, traffic classification, and shaping in real time.

In this role, you will work close to the hardware and network stack, owning critical parts of the packet processing pipeline and performance optimization, in collaboration with senior system architects and infrastructure engineers.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement high performance DPDK RX/TX pipelines with zero copy forwarding

• Build per core, lock free flow tables supporting tens of millions of concurrent flows

• Implement L7 protocol parsing including HTTP, TLS SNI, DNS, QUIC, and custom protocols

• Develop application and traffic classification using signature based and ML assisted approaches

• Implement traffic shaping and QoS mechanisms such as hierarchical token bucket

• Integrate high performance pattern matching using Hyperscan

• Perform deep performance optimization using SIMD, cache tuning, and NUMA aware design

• Profile and debug performance bottlenecks using tools such as perf, VTune, or similar

• Work closely with hardware, infrastructure, and backend teams to ensure end to end system efficiency

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands on experience with DPDK in production systems, not research or prototypes

• Strong systems programming background in C++ or Rust, with willingness to work in Rust

• Deep understanding of poll mode drivers, mbufs, lockless data structures, and NUMA architectures

• Solid knowledge of TCP/IP stack internals and packet level protocol parsing

• Proven experience building and optimizing low latency, high throughput network systems

• Strong debugging and performance analysis skills

• Ability to work independently on complex, low level technical problems

• English level sufficient for technical discussions in an international engineering team

Nice to have

• Experience working at networking vendors or telecom equipment companies

• Background in carrier grade DPI systems

• Hands on experience with traffic shaping or QoS implementations

• Experience with ML inference pipelines such as ONNX Runtime

• Familiarity with eBPF, XDP, or kernel bypass techniques

• Experience with hardware offload technologies such as Flow Director or SR IO V

This is a long term opportunity to work on a technically extreme system at the core of a growing Canadian startup, solving hard performance problems at scale and building software that operates at the limits of modern networking hardware.