Software Engineer, Edge

Persona

About The Position

Persona is the configurable identity platform built for businesses in a digital-first world. Verifying individuals and organizations is harder — but more important — than ever, with AI enabling fraudsters to launch sophisticated accounts at scale and regulations evolving rapidly. We’ve built Persona to support practically every use case and industry — that’s why we’re able to serve a wide range of leading companies. For example, Reddit relies on Persona for age assurance and verification to comply with online safety regulations, protecting younger users while maintaining a seamless experience. Meanwhile, OpenAI relies on Persona to keep bad actors out, protecting one of the world’s most powerful AI platforms from large-scale abuse in a time when AI is reshaping the way we work and live. We’re growing rapidly and looking for exceptional people to join us! Every request Persona handles crosses our network before it touches any product code. Cloudflare, ingress, DNS, and the service mesh are not background infrastructure. They are the front door and backbone. When they work, nobody notices. When they break, everything breaks. The Edge team exists because networking kept losing the prioritization battle inside a broader infrastructure team. As we’ve grown, that increasingly became the was the wrong tradeoff, and we fixed it by giving networking its own home, its own roadmap, and its own definition of done. This team owns the full traffic path — from the first packet leaving clients through our through our (Cloudflare-backed) ingress and then onward across the service mesh — as a product, not a service desk. You'll be one of the first engineers on a team with a clear, narrow mission and real ownership. You'll help define what good looks like for a traffic layer that Persona's engineers can configure, observe, and extend without filing a ticket. The changes you make to improve performance will result in meaningful client outcomes.

Requirements

Experience building and shipping production services in a polyglot environment (Go, TypeScript, or similar). You should enjoy the pros/cons of different languages — a zealot is unlikely to enjoy working in our garden
Experience diagnosing production issues at the network layer, including understanding how proxies and load balancers can obscure the real source of a problem. You should enjoy deep, methodical investigatory work — but also have the chops to quickly take on triage and solutioning should an emergency arise
Kubernetes networking in practice: ingress controllers, DNS, network policies, not just running workloads
Manages infrastructure as code in practice, not just in principle. Change safety and governance should be a feature not a bug — and you enjoy designing those processes so they appear low-friction while having real teeth
Experience building internal platforms or tools with a track record of driving adoption across engineering teams. We love OSS and hope to continue contributing, but we also need to unblock ourselves today when external tools fall short.

Nice To Haves

Cloudflare (Workers, WAF, Access, or Tunnel)
Istio or another service mesh in a multi-cluster environment
GKE or managed Kubernetes at scale
Ruby or Rails (we integrate with Ruby systems)
A “hacker’s heart” for prototyping new ideas and ways of operating — even though experimentation might not progress beyond the toy phase

Responsibilities

Own edge networking configuration: routing, WAF policy, rate limiting, certificate management, driving toward a model where engineers ship traffic changes without waiting on infra. We use Cloudflare extensively but not exclusively.
Evolve the ingress layer (controllers, lifecycle, policy, Ingress API) so inbound traffic is reliable, observable, and self-service
Manage DNS across internal clusters and external zones so name resolution is invisible by design
Build network-layer observability: latency, error rates, routing visibility that surfaces problems before they become incidents
Support Persona's regional expansion by extending networking into new geographies and ensuring regional expansion is scalable, performant, and maintainable
Help define the team's practices and technical standards. This team is new, and you'll shape what it looks like — from SDLC, usage of AI tooling, static analysis, chaos engineering, and usage of simulation. We are serious about encoding top-quality engineering practices into the team’s DNA — and you will be core to their development.