Senior Software Engineer, Network & Protocol Team (Washington, D.C.)

Senior Software Engineer (Network & Protocol Team)

Location: Washington, D.C. (HQ2)
Team: Engineering • Full‑time • Pre‑seed

About Hoplynk

Hoplynk is building the communications and networking layer for the intelligent edge, ensuring resilient connectivity for autonomous systems and mission-critical operations in any environment. We’re a pre-seed startup spun out of Stanford University and based in San Francisco developing an embedded software/firmware stack that delivers multipath, failure-aware networking across heterogeneous links so critical systems stay online when networks don’t.

The Role

You’ll be our senior networking lead and a founding engineer. Your mission: set the architecture and deliver a production-grade multipath networking stack on Linux. You’ll drive the technical roadmap from kernel and policy management to observability and QoS optimization; mentor the team; and turn user feedback into measurable improvements.

What You’ll Do and Own

• Define the end to end system architecture, including routing/transport policies, subflow management, and failover.

• Establish SLOs (latency, loss, failover time, goodput) and build comprehensive monitoring systems

• Lead design reviews, RFCs, and implementation plans across kernel/user space (iproute2, netlink, tc, eBPF/XDP, mptcpd)

• Design and run experiments with QEMU and other network simulation services

• Partner with our embedded systems team on BSP, drivers, OTA/rollback, and device observability

• Support deployments: capture traces, triage issues across layers, tune policies, and manage the release process as we scale customers

• Mentor engineers, raise standards for documentation and reliability, and help hire the early networking team.

What You’ll Bring

• Routing & Policy: Strong familiarity with writing low level code in Rust. Familiarity with queue management and load balancing optimization algorihtms. Deep knowledge of Linux routing stacks — Babel, OLSR, batman-adv — and familiarity with DPDK, eBPF, or custom datapath acceleration

• Transport & Multipath: Strong understanding of TCP, QUIC/MP-QUIC, and MPTCP protocols: congestion control, subflow orchestration, and dynamic failover logic. Ability to prototype, simulate (e.g. QEMU, Mininet), and validate transport behavior under real-world conditions.

• Telemetry & Observability: Hands-on experience with network instrumentation and metrics: RTT, packet loss, thorughput, jitter. Experience with perf, ftrace, mptcpd, and streaming telemetry pipelines.

• Leadership & Collaboration: Mentorship, clear documentation, and ability to bridge firmware, kernel, and cloud domains. You will be partnering with full-stack engineers to surface network insights in real time.

• Embedded & Security: Experience with OpenWrt, Yocto, or Buildroot environments. Familiarity with OTA frameworks (RAUC, Mender), A/B partitioning, secure boot. Comfortable working close to the metal while integrating with higher-level telemetry or cloud APIs.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with cellular modems, multi-SIM bonding, and adaptive path selection across ISPs for latency and privacy.

• Awareness of traffic fingerprinting and obfuscation techniques. Experience designing overlay networks or tunnel obfuscation layers (e.g., obfs4, Shadowsocks, uTLS)

• strong understanding of network encryption, key management, and secure channel establishment (TLS 1.3, WireGuard, IPsec).

• Ability to interpret hardware schematics, understand PHY bring-up, or debug low-level Ethernet/Wi-Fi/5G link issues.

• Experience deploying communications or networking systems in robotics, autonomy, or rugged edge environments where RF and multipath conditions vary drastically.

Tools & Tech You’ll Touch

Linux 6.x · MPTCP · OpenWrt/Debian/Ubuntu · iproute2/netlink · mptcpd · perf/ftrace · Rust / C++ / Python (routing and full-stack development)

How We Work - Hoplynk’s Values

We believe that shared values are the foundation for success. At Hoplynk, we value:

• Candor: Say the hard thing kindly, early, and with evidence. Speak up during decisions.

• Humility: Strong opinions, loosely held. Change your mind with facts. Teach and learn in the open; celebrate team wins over heroics.

• Initiative: Run toward the smoke. Own problems end-to-end. Ship in small, safe steps with clear, observable outcomes.