Principal Backend Engineer

Job description

Job Summary:

As a Senior Principal Backend Engineer - Rust, specializing in our Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) product, you will be a crucial technical leader within our engineering organization.

You will leverage the power of Rust to architect, design, and develop the core backend systems, high-throughput data processing pipelines, and resilient control plane components that underpin our NGFW.

Your expertise will be instrumental in shaping the technical direction of this flagship security product, ensuring exceptional performance, memory safety, robust security, and unwavering reliability at scale.

You will work closely with other engineers (including network and systems engineers), product managers, security researchers, and QA specialists to deliver cutting-edge NGFW capabilities.

You

will be a hands-on contributor, writing high-performance, safe, and concurrent Rust code, reviewing critical designs and code, and mentoring other engineers.

You will be a technical expert and a role model for the engineering team, particularly in leveraging Rust for demanding, systems-level network security applications.

Key Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership:

• Provide technical leadership and guidance to the Rust engineering efforts

focused on the NGFW product.

• Define and champion best practices for Rust development, specifically for high-performance, concurrent, memory-safe, and secure network security applications.

• Lead the design and architecture of complex backend systems and platform components for the NGFW, leveraging Rust for performance-critical and security-sensitive modules.

• Evaluate and select appropriate Rust crates, tools, and design patterns for building a world-class NGFW backend.

• Stay up-to-date on the latest Rust language features, ecosystem developments, networking trends, and advancements in NGFW and cybersecurity.

• Define and maintain the overall architecture for key NGFW backend systems, with a strong emphasis on Rust's strengths in performance, safety, and concurrency.

Hands-on Development:

• Write high-quality, maintainable, memory-safe, and well-tested Rust code for core NGFW functionality (e.g., efficient packet parsing and inspection, high-speed threat signature matching, security policy enforcement logic, low-latency logging).

• Contribute to all stages of the software development lifecycle, from design and prototyping to deployment and operational excellence.

• Prototype new features, algorithms, and data structures in Rust for network traffic analysis and threat prevention.

Code Review and Mentorship:

• Conduct rigorous code reviews to ensure code quality, adherence to Rust best practices (including safety and concurrency patterns), performance, and security.

• Mentor and coach other backend engineers, helping them grow their technical skills, particularly in Rust, systems programming, and network security concepts.

Performance, Scalability & Reliability Optimization:

• Identify and address performance bottlenecks in NGFW backend systems using Rust's capabilities to achieve line-rate processing goals and low latency.

• Design and implement solutions that scale to handle massive volumes of network traffic and large, complex security policy sets, leveraging Rust's efficiency.

• Ensure the high availability and resilience of the NGFW backend platform, benefiting from Rust's reliability features.

Security:

• Leverage Rust's memory safety features to build inherently more secure systems.

• Implement secure coding practices to protect system integrity, sensitive data, and prevent vulnerabilities within the backend infrastructure.

• Work closely with the security research and operations teams to translate threat intelligence into effective backend detection and prevention mechanisms written in Rust.

Collaboration:

• Work closely with product managers, security researchers, and network engineers to define requirements and translate them into robust Rust-based backend solutions for the NGFW.

• Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders regarding complex technical designs and trade-offs.

• Collaborate with other Principal Engineers and technical leaders across different areas (e.g., frontend, data science, infrastructure).

Problem Solving:

• Troubleshoot and resolve complex technical issues in distributed, high-performance backend systems, often requiring deep understanding of Rust's internals, networking protocols, and system-level behavior.

Qualifications:

Education:
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Master's degree preferred.

Experience:

• Minimum of 10+ years of software engineering experience, with extensive experience in Rust and a proven track record of technical leadership in building high-performance systems-level software, network applications, or security products using Rust.

• Deep understanding of Rust's ownership, borrowing, lifetimes, traits, and concurrency primitives (e.g., async/await, Tokio/async-std).
• Proven experience building high-performance, memory-safe, and concurrent systems.

• Strong experience with network programming in Rust (e.g., working with TCP/IP, UDP at a low level, potentially using crates like pnet, tokio-tungstenite, etc.).

• Experience with databases (SQL and NoSQL) and data modeling, and integrating them with Rust applications.

• Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) for Rust services.

• Essential: Strong understanding of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP stack, routing, switching, firewalls, VPNs).

• Highly Desirable: Experience with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS), security policy engines, or other network security technologies, ideally with some exposure to implementing these in Rust or C/C++.

• Highly Desirable: Experience designing and developing components for control plane and/or data plane of networking or security devices.

• Experience with testing frameworks and methodologies in Rust (e.g., cargo test, property-based testing, integration testing).

• Familiarity with Rust's build system (cargo) and ecosystem ).

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices for Rust applications.

• Experience working in an Agile environment.

• Experience working in Vietnam or Southeast Asia is a plus.

Skills:

• Exceptional technical skills in Rust development, specifically for systems programming, networking, and high-performance applications.

• Strong understanding of memory safety paradigms and how Rust enforces them.

• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and debugging abilities, especially in complex, concurrent systems.

• Excellent communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills.

• Proven ability to lead, mentor, and inspire other engineers on challenging technical problems with Rust.

• Passion for building high-quality, scalable, and highly secure systems, particularly in the cybersecurity domain using modern, safe languages.

• Ability to think abstractly and deal with ambiguous/undefined problems.

• Fluency in English.

Required Skill Profession

Other General