Senior Site Reliability Engineer - VPN Service | NordVPN

The world’s most advanced VPN, and a whole lot more.

If you’re a curious problem-solver who carves their own path, join the team behind Threat Protection Pro, the NordLynx protocol, and the fastest VPN on the planet—tools that put privacy, security, and control back in people’s hands.

Your impact? Helping millions take back control of their online security, privacy, and data.

NordVPN operates a globally distributed VPN and DNS infrastructure serving millions of users. Your responsibility is the service itself - deploying, managing, and improving VPN nodes worldwide while ensuring every client connection is fast, stable, and secure.

You'll work closely with application teams to guarantee smooth client connectivity end to end. Quality and reliability are the job.

Main responsibilities

• Deploy and manage globally distributed VPN and DNS services

• Ensure connection quality, stability, and performance across the entire node fleet

• Collaborate with application teams on client connectivity and protocol behavior

• Optimize VPN service performance - kernel tuning, flamechart analysis, profiling

• Manage security posture - firewalls, PKI, certificate lifecycle, hardening

• Manage authentication and authorization infrastructure

• Own configuration management and automated provisioning of infrastructure

• Clear written incident communication and postmortem ownership

Core requirements

• Own critical VPN services end-to-end including architecture, scalability, security and monitoring

• Deliver OKRs and key commitments within agreed timelines

• Write RFCs/ADRs for new features, refactors, etc

• Raises engineering quality through standards, design reviews, knowledge sharing and mentorship

• Balances reliability, security and delivery speed with strong operational judgment

• Advanced networking - VPN protocols, tunneling, routing, DNS

• Linux at depth - kernel internals, tuning, module management

• Firewall management

• Performance analysis - flamecharts, profiling, bottleneck identification

• OSI model fluency - L2 through L7, TCP/IP stack, SSL/TLS

• Security fundamentals - PKI, certificate management, hardening

• Authentication and authorization - RADIUS, access control

• Configuration management and automated deployments

• Load balancing and failover for distributed services

• Docker

Bonus Points For

• Python programming

• C, Rust, or Go - for lower-level service and performance work

• Observability knowledge - monitoring, metrics, logging for VPN services

• On-demand bare-metal/hardware provisioning

• eBPF, strace, and advanced debugging/tracing tools

• Virtualization - KVM, MicroVM

• Kubernetes networking

• Interest in AI tooling - Claude Code, agentic engineering, LLM integrations in engineering workflows

Tools You Will Use

• Linux kernel and networking stack

• SaltStack

• Consul

• Firewall - nftables

• DNS - BIND, dnsdist, Unbound

• FreeRADIUS

• Vault and PKI infrastructure

• MySQL (Percona), Redis

• Docker

• iPXE
  

What We Offer

• Sharpen your edge: training, mentorship, and room to grow — always.

• Take the time you need: extra vacation days, sick days, and time off when life calls.

• Get premium healthcare: private health insurance in Lithuania and Poland — fully covered.

• Protect your peace: enjoy free subscriptions to Calm, Headspace, and Mindletic, and our own resilience and mindfulness trainings.

• Own your fitness: in-house gyms, sport cards, online workouts, and personal guidance — on us.

• Pack your bags for workation: experience our company-wide trip abroad to the fullest.

• Work from anywhere: work from wherever keeps you in the zone.

• Celebrate your milestones: birthdays, weddings, and new family members — all deserve a gift.

• Parent with ease: children’s summer camps and flexibility around the schedule — because parenting never pauses.

• Join the party: team building and company events people talk about for months.

• Unlock Cyber City: coffee bar, open gyms, kids’ room, music room, massage chairs — our Vilnius HQ is yours to enjoy.

Kindly refer to our Privacy Notice for Recruitment Candidates for comprehensive information regarding our data handling procedures throughout recruitment processes.

We expect all candidates to provide accurate and complete information during the recruitment process. While limited use of AI tools to refine application materials is acceptable, candidates remain fully responsible for ensuring that their submissions reflect their own qualifications, skills, and experience. Any failure to do so may negatively affect participation in the recruitment process. If broader AI assistance is allowed for a particular role or stage, we’ll let you know in advance.

By submitting your application, you acknowledge that it may be processed using automated tools for evaluation purposes. As part of our recruitment process, we may use an AI-based application review tool to help assess applications based on skills and experience relevant to the role. This technology is used to support - not replace - human decision-making, and every application is ultimately reviewed by a recruiter.

If you would like more information about how AI is used in this process or wish to exercise your rights under applicable data privacy laws, please contact us at privacy@nordaccount.com. Should you prefer to opt out of the automated evaluation, please submit your application directly to career@nordsec.com.