Software Engineer (Fullstack)

Viasat, Inc. • Boston, MA

8d • Hybrid

About The Position

Snappi is a Viasat subsidiary building a delivery layer organized around time-to-pixel instead of time-to-byte—an intelligent content delivery network that continuously optimizes ecommerce web performance. A CDN that learns. A conventional CDN moves every byte as fast as it can. We figure out which bytes the page needs to render fast. Knowing the difference is a learning problem, not a caching one.
We combine startup agility with enterprise stability: a small, deliberately lean team in the business-model validation phase, with the benefits and resources of an established global company behind us. What you build ships to production and gets measured against whether it actually moves the needle for merchants. You will build and operate our intelligent CDN platform serving global traffic, working across core infrastructure and AI-powered operations—web performance optimization, browser technologies (resource hints, compression dictionaries, Early Hints, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3), and emerging standards. Because the team is small, you won't own a narrow slice: you'll follow problems across the edge proxy, the ML pipeline, data collection, and the tooling that lets a handful of engineers run a system at scale.
You are the kind of engineer who finds deeply understanding technical problems—and coming up with simple, innovative solutions to them—genuinely interesting. When a number looks wrong, you want to know why. When an elegant solution emerges, you get a real thrill out of it. That disposition pays off quickly here: you'd work directly with the founder, often get first crack at solving the problems you've identified, and see your own ideas reach production in days rather than quarters. None of which is about long hours. We don't think endurance is a talent, and nobody here is keeping score on who worked late. What we're describing is enthusiasm, not sacrifice.
Boston or New England–based candidates. We're a hybrid remote team, with 2-3 days per month at the Boston office—though we'd expect more time on-site early on, while you're ramping up and getting to know everyone.

Requirements

• 5+ years experience in software development/engineering
• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, or equivalent experience. We especially value interdisciplinary backgrounds—a BA in CS, or someone who explored philosophy, literature, design, or other fields alongside their technical studies
• Systems design: You've designed and operated backend services in production, not just contributed features to them—you think about failure modes, deployment, and what happens at 3am
• Foundation: Strong problem-solving, continuous learner, collaborative. You can explain something complex and make the listener understand it—and you treat a technical conversation as a shared build, integrating pushback in real time, rather than a lecture to defend
• Optimizer instinct and ownership: You notice inefficient or broken things and can't leave them alone. You think about uptime, customers, and impact the way a founder does—anticipating failure modes and investigating without being told each step
• Intellectual honesty: You're comfortable saying "I don't know" and candid about the edges of your understanding. We'd rather see genuine reasoning than performed expertise
• Energized by what AI makes possible: Less about specific tools than disposition. One engineer can attempt far more than they could three years ago, and the people we want are already playing with that rather than waiting for it to settle—with judgment about when to trust these tools and when to push back

Nice To Haves

• Solid fundamentals in Python, Go, Rust, Java, or C/C++, data structures, algorithms, complexity analysis, networking concepts (DNS, HTTP, TCP/IP), and web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React).
• Familiarity with web performance metrics (LCP, CLS), edge/CDN internals, ML for real-world decision-making, or data pipelines is a plus—but we care more about how you learn than what you already know
• Systems and product thinking: You reason about second- and third-order effects—who wins, who loses, what breaks, what emerges—and you care about whether what we build actually creates value for real users and customers, not just whether it's a good piece of engineering

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy cloud and edge network infrastructure software across AWS and GCP (our edge runs on Go / Caddy modules on GCE)
• Own the deployment path for what you build—CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and the observability to know it's working
• Contribute to the ML pipeline that optimizes routing, caching, and delivery decisions—no ML background required, just the appetite to learn it
• Work with real-user and synthetic performance data flowing through our collection and analytics pipeline
• Build self-healing systems that detect, diagnose, and resolve production issues automatically
• Help build the autonomous agent architecture we run on: systems that keep making progress unattended, that a person can inspect and redirect from anywhere, and that hand off cleanly to a human or another agent. Genuinely unsolved territory—you'd be helping invent it, not implementing someone's finished design

Benefits

• range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits, dependent on the position offered
• comprehensive benefit offerings that are focused on your holistic health and wellness

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior