SmartVerify — Cloud Native Sr. Engineer (Data Plane)

Smartverify•,

69d•CA$80,000 - CA$145,000•Remote

About The Position

SmartVerify is the data security and compliance layer for enterprise AI. We sit inline between AI agents and the data they query, inspecting every interaction, enforcing policy, and producing the audit trail that maps to TRAIGA, the Colorado AI Act, California DROP, and the EU AI Act. We are a small, technical team building infrastructure that enterprise security teams and regulators will rely on. We are looking for a Software Engineer to join and own the data plane. This is not a feature engineering role. You will be working close to the metal — on proxy internals, systems programming, and the infrastructure that makes inline inspection possible at production scale. You will report to the Principal Backend Engineer and work closely with a small, senior team. There is real mentorship available here, and real ownership too. If you are early in your career but have gone deep on systems programming through open source contributions, coursework, or personal projects we want to hear from you. Please don't hesitate to send links to any relevant work. We read everything.

Requirements

Rust or Go — production-quality systems code
Kubernetes — deploying and operating workloads in EKS or similar
Distributed systems fundamentals — concurrency, failure modes, consistency trade-offs, performance & latency
Comfort with low-level networking concepts (TCP/IP, proxies, packet flow)
Strong debugging skills in complex multi-component environments
Ability to read and reason about open source systems code (not just use it)
Located in BC, Canada — able to travel to Vancouver with 3 days notice

Nice To Haves

Envoy proxy — configuration, extension, or filter development
WebAssembly (WASM) — any context: browser, server-side, or embedded
CNCF project contribution — Kubernetes, Envoy, or related upstream work
gRPC and Protocol Buffers
AWS platform — EKS, IAM, KMS, Kinesis
Observability tooling — Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
Experience with mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE, or workload identity
Exposure to security, compliance, or audit logging systems
You have gone deep on at least one systems programming project — not just used a framework, but understood what is happening underneath it
You are comfortable reading open source code (Envoy, Kubernetes, WASM runtimes) to understand how something actually works
You have strong opinions about correctness, failure handling, and observability — and you can articulate why
You are early in your career but not early in your thinking — you ask good questions and you know what you do not know
CNCF community participation — contributing to Kubernetes, Envoy, or related upstream projects — is a genuine differentiator here

Responsibilities

The Envoy stack
WASM filter development for deep packet inspection within the Envoy data plane
EKS deployment, Helm charts, GitOps workflows, and CI/CD pipelines for data plane services
Observability eg- Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, and alerting for the hot path
Redis sidecar integration for low-latency classification cache
Audit log stream ensuring every inspected event is emitted reliably and durably
Contributing to ADR authorship as the data plane evolves