Principal Rust Developer

About the role

You will design and implement distributed system and core infrastructure components that power the next generation of our cloud-native Zero Trust Exchange platform. You will own the design of a low-latency, high-throughput data forwarding plane built with Rust, directly shaping how we handle massive scale for hundreds of millions of users. You will collaborate closely with security, networking, and product stakeholders to ensure the platform meets stringent reliability and performance goals. This role gives you ownership over critical infrastructure where your technical decisions have immediate and widespread impact. You will leverage the world's largest security data set to guide optimizations and ensure our systems remain resilient against evolving threats. You will mentor junior engineers, drive technical documentation, and foster a culture of constructive debate focused on getting to the best ideas faster. You are expected to use AI to amplify your impact and thrive in an environment that values transparency, ownership, and accountability.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect and build a low-latency, high-throughput data forwarding plane using Rust, leveraging its async/await model for efficient I/O and service-oriented infrastructure.
• Develop distributed, scalable systems with a focus on concurrency, fault tolerance, and messaging to ensure high reliability and horizontal scalability.
• Implement and maintain gRPC-based APIs and services to integrate forwarding plane capabilities with control and orchestration layers across the platform.
• Optimize system performance using profiling tools across kernel-space and user-space to identify bottlenecks and drive measurable improvements.
• Engage in code reviews, system design discussions, technical documentation, and mentoring junior engineers to elevate the overall quality of the codebase.
• Work with security data sets and real-world traffic patterns to validate platform behavior and drive data-informed optimizations.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to define interfaces, prioritize features, and ensure alignment with customer needs and product goals.
• Take ownership of on-call responsibilities, diagnosing issues in production and driving rapid resolutions to maintain platform integrity.
• Contribute to the broader open source ecosystem where applicable, ensuring our implementations adhere to best practices and industry standards.
• Help define and evolve the technical roadmap for the forwarding plane in collaboration with senior leadership and product stakeholders.
• Build observability and debugging tools that make it easier to understand system behavior and surface actionable insights.
• Champion secure coding practices and contribute to threat modeling sessions to ensure security is baked into the platform from the ground up.

Requirements

• You act like an owner, fueling your bias for action with a passion for the mission and navigating seamlessly between high-level strategy and hands-on execution.
• You are a problem-solver who seeks out challenges and is energized by finding solutions to hard problems that deliver the biggest impact for our customers.
• You are customer-obsessed, building deep empathy for internal and external customers and anchoring every decision in solving their real-world problems.
• You are driven by innovation and technical curiosity, constantly looking for better, more secure, and scalable ways to accelerate digital transformation.
• You think at scale, connecting your work to the larger company mission and building solutions that support a high-growth, global organization.
• You have extensive experience coding with Rust, particularly in systems programming and async frameworks like Tokio or async-std.
• You have proven expertise in building resilient, observable, and horizontally scalable distributed systems that can handle large volumes of traffic.
• You have a strong understanding of Linux fundamentals, including networking, namespaces, sockets, and kernel-user space interaction.
• You are proficient in container-based environments, Git, CI/CD workflows, and performance instrumentation to maintain high standards of quality.
• You are comfortable working in a fast-paced, high-impact environment where transparency, honest debate, and ownership are core values.

Nice to have

• Experience with systems languages like C/C++ or Go, particularly in performance-critical environments where latency and throughput are critical.
• Familiarity with Linux networking stacks, kernel-space technologies such as eBPF or DPDK, and Kubernetes networking concepts to enable advanced traffic management and service mesh integrations.

Practical notes

• This is a hybrid role based in San Jose, California, USA.
• Engagement details and compensation specifics are to be confirmed in source materials.