Staff Software Engineer - Backend Networking
About The Position
The Staff Software Engineer will work on Dragos’s Sensor Platform, a high-performance, Linux-based network sensor that captures and processes operational technology (OT) and industrial control system (ICS) traffic in real time. The role leads large-scale platform initiatives from design through production, sets technical standards for the Sensor Skill Community, and translates business goals for reliability, latency, and data fidelity into durable engineering decisions. The position works closely with product, infrastructure, and engineering peers and includes mentoring and technical leadership.
Requirements
- At least 8 years of experience designing, developing, and debugging distributed systems software.
- Deep Rust expertise, including asynchronous and concurrent programming, ownership discipline, and performance-sensitive systems design.
- Experience architecting or leading a significant systems initiative end-to-end, from design documentation through production deployment.
- Strong grasp of concurrent system design, including pipeline topologies, graceful shutdown sequencing, backpressure management, and active queue management.
- Experience with high-performance packet capture and Linux systems programming for low-latency workloads.
- Ability to lead root cause analysis on complex, multi-component failures and drive durable fixes that hold under production load.
- Experience with message queuing or broker systems under production load.
- Awareness of how sensor reliability and data fidelity affect detection quality in ICS/OT network monitoring environments.
- Experience applying cybersecurity best practices, including secure coding, data protection, and awareness of common threats and vulnerabilities.
Responsibilities
- Lead Sensor Platform initiatives involving high-throughput ingestion, pipeline scalability, continuous capture, and queue management reliability.
- Own root cause analysis and postmortems for complex production and canary issues involving the capture pipeline, broker, shutdown behavior, and message broker integration.
- Establish and champion standards for documentation, test harnesses, observability, and performance benchmarks across the sensor codebase.
- Translate business goals, including latency targets, new capture interface support, and reliability SLOs, into technical plans and delivery milestones.
- Identify and address gaps in observability, reliability, and developer experience by building tooling to improve diagnosis and delivery confidence.
- Mentor team members and contribute to design and code reviews across experience levels.
Benefits
- Competitive equity package
- Comprehensive benefits plan
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
