Staff Software Engineer - Threat Protection Systems

A10 Networks, Inc•San Jose, CA

3d•$0 - $160,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At A10 Networks, we help customers keep their applications always secure and always available. We deliver security, intelligence, and automation across secure application solutions, and we are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help develop next-generation Threat Protection System (TPS) products. The DDoS threat landscape is changing rapidly as modern botnets, including variants such as Aisuru and Kimwolf, make large-scale attacks more common and more difficult to mitigate with traditional approaches. In this role, the engineer will apply deep insight into attack behavior to build next-generation TPS capabilities that enable rapid detection, adaptive mitigation, AI-augmented analysis, and faster customer response against evolving DDoS threats. The engineer will contribute across design, implementation, debugging, testing, and integration while working closely with product managers, architects, QA, support, and platform teams.

Requirements

BS/MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
3+ years of software engineering experience in networking, security, distributed systems, Linux systems, or related product development
Strong programming skills in C/C++ and scripting languages such as Python and Bash
Solid understanding of OSI layers, TCP/IP networking, packet processing, and protocols such as DNS, HTTP, and TLS
Hands-on experience with Linux-based networking systems, including: Operating system concepts, user-space or kernel networking components
Packet filtering, forwarding, traffic-processing paths, or multi-threaded systems
Debugging and profiling tools such as GDB, Wireshark, perf, or similar tools
Ability to design and implement product features from requirements through coding, testing, debugging, and validation
Good communication skills and ability to work with cross-functional engineering, QA, support, and product teams

Nice To Haves

Strong ownership mindset and willingness to take on challenging product, customer-support, and integration work
Good systems thinking and ability to design for performance, scale, reliability, observability, and operational usability
Practical problem-solving ability with attention to debugging, root-cause analysis, unit testing, and implementation quality
Curiosity for next-generation security technologies, including AI/ML applications, container platforms, and distributed systems

Responsibilities

Design and contribute to novel DDoS detection and mitigation approaches based on malware internals, traffic behavior, L4/L7 protocol patterns, and policy enforcement requirements
Contribute to an extensible DDoS mitigation data plane that enables programmable packet-processing logic and rapid response to newly emerging botnet attack patterns
Work across data plane, control plane, configuration, logging, and policy enforcement components using multi-core and multi-threaded programming techniques
Investigate defects, analyze traffic behavior, identify root causes, and deliver practical fixes using tools such as GDB, Wireshark, tcpdump, and related network utilities
Collaborate with QA, support, product management, architects, and other engineering teams to clarify requirements, review designs, and validate customer-impacting features
Create design notes, implementation documentation, unit tests, and end-to-end validation plans for assigned features