Staff/Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Network

Slack•Palo Alto, CA

6d•$184,000 - $253,000

About The Position

The Cloud Network team is a globally distributed team of systems and software engineers across Australia, the US, and Canada, responsible for enabling the fast and reliable delivery of Slack to over 17M+ daily active users worldwide. We manage Slack’s AWS cloud ecosystem and provide the foundational networking, account and identity access, and infrastructure-as-code platforms that power Slack’s operations at scale. Our work spans ingress load balancing and intelligent traffic management—including our own fleet of software load balancers, cloud load balancing infrastructure, DNS and CDN services. We also design and operate systems for DDoS detection and automated mitigation, ensuring Slack remains resilient against large-scale threats. We are a small team making a large impact. We rapidly iterate and work closely with other teams in engineering ensuring resilient systems built to scale. We have a strong commitment to quality and understand that simplicity and reliability should be primary aspects of the systems that we build. Reliability is Slack’s most critical feature! This is a full-time staff engineering position based in the U.S.

Requirements

Must have lawful permanent residency in the U.S.
8+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on distributed systems, cloud-native applications, and microservices.
Hands-on experience with cloud providers such as AWS or GCP
Strong knowledge of TCP/IP, DNS, DNSSEC, and related network protocols.
Proven track record of building tools, automation, or services using one or more programming languages (e.g., Go, Ruby, Python, C/C++).
Extensive experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
Prior experience deploying, operating, and debugging server software on Linux.
Strong interpersonal and communication skills; able to explain complex technical concepts to designers, support staff, and fellow engineers.
A BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field (or equivalent work experience).

Nice To Haves

A domain expert within the AWS ecosystem (NLB, VPC / IAM / S3 / EC2)
Experience contributing to or operating large-scale, highly available production systems.
Knowledge of DDoS detection/mitigation strategies and automation frameworks.
Interest in cost optimization and operational efficiency at cloud scale.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate the systems that power Slack’s global cloud networking stack—including ingress/egress load balancing, service-to-service networking, DNS, CDN, and traffic management.
Develop and automate detection, mitigation, and response systems to defend against DDoS and other large-scale network threats.
Contribute to infrastructure-as-code and automation frameworks to improve reliability, repeatability, and efficiency.
Troubleshoot complex issues across applications, distributed systems, and networks in Linux-based environments.
Partner closely with AWS and other engineering teams to scale Slack’s worldwide infrastructure and adopt new cloud technologies.
Drive improvements in system observability, reliability, and ease-of-use by iterating quickly on designs and collaborating across engineering.
Participate in on-call rotations to ensure the availability and resiliency of critical Slack infrastructure.