Job Details

Senior Software Engineer, Network & Protocol Team (Remote)

Explore the Senior Software Engineer, Network & Protocol Team (Remote) role at Hoplynk.

Location: Washington, D.C. (HQ2)

Team: Engineering

Employment Type: Full?time

Company Stage: 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. Were 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 dont.

The Role

Youll be our senior networking lead and a founding engineer. Your mission: set the architecture and deliver a production?grade multipath networking stack on Linux. Youll 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 Youll 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 Youll Bring

• Routing & Policy: Strong familiarity with writing low?level code in Rust. Familiarity with queue management and load balancing optimization algorithms. 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, throughput, 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 Youll Touch

Linux 6.x

• MPTCP
• OpenWrt/Debian/Ubuntu
• iproute2/netlink
• mptcpd
• perf/ftrace
• Rust / C++ / Python (routing and full?stack development)

How We Work Hoplynks Values

• 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.