Staff Software Engineer, Firewall

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Act as the technical lead for the Firewall pod within Precision Defense, taking a hands-on approach.

• Manage the Web Application Firewall workstream from initial problem definition and design through to delivery, operation, and ongoing iterations.

• Create and implement integrations with WAF management platforms and APIs.

• Establish correctness checks that address validated attack paths while ensuring legitimate traffic and service availability are maintained.

• Develop robust workflows for long-running or resumable operations, incorporating retries, idempotency, timeouts, and handling of partial failures.

• Design safety controls for configuration changes, which include authorization, least privilege, precondition checks, auditability, staged rollouts, validation, recovery, and rollback procedures.

• Create observability features to ensure engineers and customers can comprehend assessments, recommendations, and the underlying rationale.

• Contribute production code while influencing architecture decisions and leading design and code reviews.

• Collaborate with Product, Engineering, AI research, and Attack teams to define scope, sequence work, manage dependencies, and link technical decisions to customer outcomes.

• Mentor engineers and guide them through influence.

• Clearly communicate risks and tradeoffs in writing.

⛳️ Requirements

• Experience in staff-level technical leadership, including setting direction, making tradeoffs, and influencing engineering teams.

• Strong, hands-on software engineering skills with a background in designing, shipping, and managing production backend systems.

• Expert-level knowledge in large-scale Python software development.

• Over 8 years of experience in leading technical initiatives at a Staff, Lead, or similar capacity.

• Familiarity with WAF platforms and policy models, such as AWS WAF, Cloudflare, F5, Imperva, FortiWeb, or ModSecurity/OWASP CRS.

• Proficiency in Go, Rust, or another modern backend programming language.

• Experience in designing service-oriented systems, APIs, or integrations.

• Strong skills in systems design focusing on correctness, reliability, security, and maintainability.

• Capability to convert ambiguous product or customer challenges into concrete technical plans.

• Excellent technical writing and communication abilities.

• Experience in API security, bot management, rate limiting, application security testing, network firewalls, or segmentation is a plus.

• Experience integrating security or infrastructure platforms with diverse APIs and policy models is advantageous.

• Familiarity with cloud environments, containerization, and managing services at scale is beneficial.

🏝️ Benefits

• Stock options/equity package for all full-time positions.

• Health, vision, and dental insurance coverage for you and your family.

• Flexible vacation policy.

• Generous parental leave benefits.

• Opportunities for career development.

• A culture that is inclusive and collaborative.

• Options for remote and hybrid work models based on role and location.