Vultr is seeking a Software Engineer to join the Core Cloud Engineering team and help build the out-of-band (OOB) control plane that sits underneath every server in our fleet. This is the layer that makes a rack of bare metal behave like cloud -- IPMI gateways, Redfish abstractions, DPU control and provisioning, serial-over-LAN, and the automation that ties them together. If you like working close to the hardware, writing systems code in Rust (with some Go and PHP in the mix), and shipping infrastructure that other engineers depend on every day, this is a strong fit. You will be writing real production code from day one against real hardware in real datacenters, with a team of engineers who will help you go deep fast.
Key Responsibilities
Build and maintain services that interact with server BMCs over IPMI and Redfish across a heterogeneous hardware fleet (Dell, Supermicro, HPE, AMD, NVIDIA platforms)
Develop control-plane tooling for DPU provisioning and lifecycle management (NVIDIA BlueField, AMD Pensando)
Implement and harden serial-over-LAN, virtual media, and remote console workflows
Write Rust services (and Go/PHP where appropriate) that are observable, well-tested, and safe to run unattended at fleet scale
Contribute to internal SDKs and shared libraries used by other infrastructure teams
Partner with datacenter operations and hardware vendors to debug firmware, BMC, and DPU behavior in production
Participate in design reviews, code reviews, and on-call rotations for the OOB control plane
Improve test coverage, CI/CD pipelines, and tooling that lets us ship hardware automation safely
Document interfaces, runbooks, and failure modes so the system stays operable as it grows
Qualifications
2+ years of professional software engineering experience building backend services or systems software
Production experience in at least one of Rust, Go, or C/C++ -- and willingness to ramp on Rust as the primary language
Solid working knowledge of Linux -- processes, networking, systemd, basic kernel concepts
Comfortable with HTTP APIs, JSON, gRPC, and at least one of the common RPC/IPC patterns
Familiarity with at least one of IPMI, Redfish, BMC tooling, PXE/iPXE, or bare metal provisioning -- or strong systems fundamentals and clear interest in learning it
Comfortable reading vendor documentation, RFCs, and packet captures to figure out how something actually works
Strong written communication -- can write a clear design doc, PR description, or incident postmortem
Bonus: exposure to DPUs, SmartNICs, SR-IOV, IOMMU, or virtualization stacks (KVM/QEMU/libvirt)
Bonus: experience with BGP, VXLAN, or datacenter networking
