Sr. Staff Engineer

Illumio•Sunnyvale, CA

3d•$232,000 - $278,000

About The Position

As a senior technical leader on Illumio’s Architecture Team, the Sr. Staff Engineer will help define the next generation of the company’s platform and services. The role influences engineering direction across multiple product areas, establishes technical standards, and drives architectural decisions that affect customers globally. It involves leading architecture and design for large-scale distributed systems, shaping long-term technical strategy, and building scalable, resilient, observable backend services. The position partners with Engineering, Product Management, Security, and Infrastructure teams, advises and mentors engineers, evaluates emerging technologies, and represents architectural decisions to technical and executive stakeholders. The role aligns with Illumio’s Senior Staff/Expert-level expectations, including broad expertise, cross-discipline leadership, independent judgment on significant business-impacting initiatives, and influence across the engineering organization.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
12+ years of professional software engineering experience building large-scale backend and distributed systems.
Proven experience designing and operating highly available, cloud-native platforms in production environments.
Deep expertise in distributed systems concepts, including consistency models, fault tolerance, consensus, service discovery, caching, messaging, and resiliency patterns.
Expert-level proficiency in Java and/or Go, with strong software architecture and design skills.
Experience building and operating microservices-based architectures at scale.
Strong knowledge of public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Experience with Kubernetes, containers, and modern cloud orchestration technologies.
Deep understanding of API design, event-driven architectures, and service-to-service communication patterns.
Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.
Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across an organization.

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree.
Experience building cybersecurity, networking, or Zero Trust products.
Contributions to open-source projects or participation in engineering communities.
Experience scaling globally distributed systems supporting enterprise customers.
Published technical content, conference speaking, or recognized thought leadership within backend architecture and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of large-scale distributed systems powering Illumio’s cloud platform.
Drive long-term technical strategy and architectural direction across multiple engineering organizations.
Design highly scalable, resilient, and observable backend services capable of operating at significant scale.
Partner with Engineering, Product Management, Security, and Infrastructure teams to align architecture with business objectives.
Establish frameworks, patterns, and engineering standards that improve system reliability, maintainability, and developer productivity.
Act as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to Staff and Senior Engineers across the organization.
Influence technology decisions involving cloud-native architecture, microservices, messaging systems, data platforms, and service orchestration.
Lead resolution of complex architectural challenges involving performance, availability, reliability, and security.
Evaluate emerging technologies and drive adoption of innovations that improve platform capabilities and operational excellence.
Champion engineering best practices, including design reviews, operational readiness, observability, testing strategies, and technical debt reduction.
Represent architecture decisions to technical and executive stakeholders and build alignment across teams.