Director, Engineering - Edge Linux Networking

Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly’s edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers’ applications as close to their end-users as possible — at the edge of the Internet. The platform is designed to take advantage of the modern internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development. Fastly’s customers include many of the world’s most prominent companies, including GitHub, Yelp, Paramount, and JetBlue.

We're building a more trustworthy Internet. Come join us.

Posting Open Date: April 23, 2026

Anticipated Posting Close Date*: May 7, 2026

*Job posting may close early due to the volume of applicants.

Director SW Engineering - Edge Linux Networking

In this role, you will manage Fastly’s Kernel engineering team that is critical to the operational excellence of Fastly. You will be responsible for continuing to optimize performance and stability for the low latency data path of Fastly’s edge which runs through the Linux kernel and XDP. This team is the engine of the whole business of Fastly as all of our customer traffic traverses this data path. 

At Fastly we keep our kernel up to date with the latest upstream releases to ensure we are leveraging and contributing to cutting edge Linux technologies. Finally the team supports the hardware platform it runs on while also supporting the life cycle of OCI containers and Linux Operating System Distributions. The Fastly kernel team is the center of the company’s Edge stack and you will be playing a critical role in ensuring stability for our customers 

What You'll Do

• Define and drive the long-term strategy for Edge Linux Networking ensuring it aligns seamlessly with the company's broader business goals and long-term vision.
• Lead, mentor and coach your team - a diverse array of kernel developers, architects, network and site reliability engineers - to deliver new systems and support existing ones
• Co-Develop new solutions across kernel, XDP and user agents to support the Linux Operating System
• Prioritize the team’s roadmap based on cross-functional and product needs and help unblock your team
• Collaborate with Eng and Ops teams to improve performance, automation and efficiency
• Cultivate a positive and productive engineering culture - attracting and retaining exceptional engineering talent and nourishing their professional growth within the team.
• Support teams during times of rapid growth and organizational maturation by utilizing change management techniques and ensuring technical and operational alignment among teams and team members.
• Set the right balance between urgency and quality by implementing clear repeatable engineering processes & best practices

What We're Looking For: 

• 5+ years leading engineering teams & managing engineers at all career levels.
• 10+ years of domain relevant software engineering experience with a focus on low-level systems 
• 5+ years of experience in Linux kernel development, linux kernel subsystems maintenance (e.g., resolving kernel rebase issues).
• Expertise in network data path and deployment methodologies.
• Linux x86-64 and AMD64 Kernel Development, rebasing and troubleshooting
• Experience maintaining Linux Distributions (Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc) 
• Experience with OCI Containers (i.e. Docker)
• Large scale Fleet management and Release techniques
• Strong product and business orientation, with the ability to connect technical investments directly to revenue and growth outcomes
• Excellent communication and cross-functional leadership skills, with executive presence to influence at the C-suite level
• Experience fostering inclusive, collaborative, and high-accountability engineering cultures

 

We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these:

• Scaling engineering organizations through rapid growth and transformation phases
• Experience with acute incident response including addressing security vulnerabilities.
• Implementing IETF RFC specifications particularly transport protocols
• Experience in distributed systems and highly available environments
  
  

Work Hours:

This position will require you to be available during core business hours and occasional nights and weekends as required for on-call rotation.

 

Work Location(s) & Travel Requirements: 

The preferred office locations for this position are:

• San Francisco, CA
• Denver, CO
• New York, NY