Software Engineer - Data Plane / VPN / Gateways

Arista Networks is an industry leader in data-driven, client-to-cloud networking for large data center, campus and routing environments. Arista is a well-established and profitable company with over $8 billion in revenue. Arista’s award-winning platforms, ranging in Ethernet speeds up to 800G bits per second, redefine scalability, agility, and resilience. Arista is a founding member of the Ultra Ethernet consortium. We have shipped over 20 million cloud networking ports worldwide with CloudVision and EOS, an advanced network operating system. Arista is committed to open standards, and its products are available worldwide directly and through partners.
At Arista, we value the diversity of thought and perspectives each employee brings. We believe fostering an inclusive environment where individuals from various backgrounds and experiences feel welcome is essential for driving creativity and innovation. Our commitment to excellence has earned us several prestigious awards, such as the Great Place to Work Survey for Best Engineering Team and Best Company for Diversity, Compensation, and Work-Life Balance. At Arista, we take pride in our track record of success and strive to maintain the highest quality and performance standards in everything we do.

Who You’ll Work With

You will be engaged in working on cutting-edge VeloCloud SD-WAN product in the Campus network portfolio of Arista. You will join the Gateway team, a core group responsible for a foundational component of the Velocloud SD-WAN stack. This team owns the Velocloud Gateway, a globally distributed, multi-tenant service deployed as SaaS. Your work will directly involve all aspects of a modern cloud service, including enhancing observability, optimizing cloud-scaling and load-balancing, engineering seamless rolling upgrades, and ensuring rock-solid availability. Your mission will be to innovate on new capabilities while maintaining the robustness of this critical infrastructure.

If you're really into Networking, Cloud, Systems, Security, and cloud-native tech, Arista is an awesome spot for you! We've got cool opportunities in so many areas, like tooling for packaging, builds, artifact management, product development for security certifications, cloud-native architectures, observability & network metric analytics, and L2/L3 networking. You'll get tons of chances to learn and totally feel like part of the team.

What You’ll Do

• Own the Gateway: Take complete end-to-end ownership of the Gateway component within the SD-WAN stack, from architecture to operations.
• Drive Quality & Security: Own the quality of the Gateways by building automated tests. Proactively manage security by automating scans, applying OS/kernel patches, mitigating vulnerabilities in the code, and staying connected with the Ubuntu/Canonical community.
• Build & Deploy: Develop and maintain cloud-first, scalable software and the automation tooling required for its global deployment and management.
• Hands-on Engineering: Make daily, hands-on contributions to the SASE/SD-WAN build and release pipeline (Jenkins, make, apt) and advance our high-performance dataplane using multi-threaded C programming.
• Collaborate to Solve: Work closely with other staff software engineers to troubleshoot and solve complex, system-level challenges.

• Strong computer science fundamentals, including building cloud-first, scalable, and modular software designs.
• In-depth knowledge of networking and data-plane architectures.
• Proficiency in C/C++ programming, with an emphasis on multi-threaded programming.
• Experience in writing unit and functional tests, and a strong sense of software quality ownership.
• Familiarity with build and packaging tools (e.g., make, dpkg, rpm) and CI/CD systems.
• Ability to work independently in a fast-paced environment.
• Deep technical skills and broad knowledge across multiple platforms and architectures, with a strong understanding of algorithms and data structures.
• Scripting experience (Python, shell scripting, etc.) is desirable.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes and OS kernels is a significant advantage.

Arista stands out as an engineering-centric company. Our leadership, including founders and engineering managers, are all engineers who understand sound software engineering principles and the importance of doing things right. We hire globally into our diverse team. At Arista, engineers have complete ownership of their projects. Our management structure is flat and streamlined, and software engineering is led by those who understand it best. We prioritize the development and utilization of test automation tools. Our engineers have access to every part of the company, providing opportunities to work across various domains. Arista is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with development offices in Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, and the US. We consider all our R&D centers equal in stature. Join us to shape the future of networking and be part of a culture that values invention, quality, respect, and fun.