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.