Senior DPDK / Systems Engineer

Olive is a Canadian product startup building a carrier-grade network intelligence platform with high-performance deep packet inspection and traffic classification engine. This Senior DPDK / Systems Engineer role involves designing and optimizing critical packet processing pipelines that operate at line rate speeds, processing tens of millions of concurrent flows in real-time for security, intelligence, and telecom environments.

• Design and implement high-performance DPDK RX/TX pipelines with zero-copy forwarding
• Build per-core, lock-free flow tables supporting tens of millions of concurrent flows
• Implement L7 protocol parsing including HTTP, TLS SNI, DNS, QUIC, and custom protocols
• Develop application and traffic classification using signature-based and ML-assisted approaches
• Implement traffic shaping and QoS mechanisms such as hierarchical token bucket
• Integrate high-performance pattern matching using Hyperscan
• Perform deep performance optimization using SIMD, cache tuning, and NUMA-aware design
• Profile and debug performance bottlenecks using tools such as perf or VTune
• Work closely with hardware, infrastructure, and backend teams for end-to-end system efficiency

• 5+ years of hands-on production experience with DPDK
• Strong systems programming background in C++ or Rust
• Deep understanding of poll mode drivers, mbufs, lockless data structures, and NUMA architectures
• Solid knowledge of TCP/IP stack internals and packet-level protocol parsing
• Proven experience building and optimizing low-latency, high-throughput network systems
• Strong debugging and performance analysis skills
• Ability to work independently on complex, low-level technical problems
• English proficiency sufficient for technical discussions in international engineering team

Nice to have: Experience at networking vendors or telecom equipment companies, background in carrier-grade DPI systems, hands-on traffic shaping or QoS implementations, ML inference pipeline experience (ONNX Runtime), familiarity with eBPF/XDP/kernel bypass techniques, hardware offload technologies (Flow Director, SR-IOV).

Long-term opportunity to work on technically advanced systems at a growing Canadian startup.