Staff Software Engineer - Backend Networking

About the Role:

The Sensor Platform is the foundation of Dragos's threat detection capability — a high-performance, Linux-based network sensor that captures and processes traffic from operational technology (OT) and industrial control system (ICS) environments in real time. As a Staff Software Engineer on the Sensor team, you'll lead large-scale platform initiatives from design through production, set the technical bar for the Sensor Skill Community, and translate business-level goals — reliability, latency, data fidelity — into durable engineering decisions. This is the role where systems depth, ownership, and cross-functional influence all converge.

Responsibilities:

• Lead large-scale Sensor Platform initiatives — high-throughput ingestion improvements, pipeline scalability, continuous capture capability, and queue management reliability — in close collaboration with product, infrastructure, and engineering peers.
• 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 (latency targets, new capture interface support, reliability SLOs) into concrete technical plans and delivery milestones.
• Identify and close gaps in observability, reliability, and developer experience — building the tooling that helps the team diagnose production issues faster and ship with more confidence.
• Elevate the team through mentorship, design reviews, and code review across all experience levels.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and debugging distributed systems software.
• Deep Rust expertise across asynchronous and concurrent programming, ownership discipline, and performance-sensitive systems design.
• Demonstrated experience architecting or leading a significant systems initiative end-to-end, from design documentation through production deployment.
• Strong grasp of concurrent system design: 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.
• Proven 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 directly affect detection quality in ICS/OT network monitoring environments.
• Demonstrated experience applying cybersecurity best practices, including secure coding, data protection, and awareness of common threats and vulnerabilities.

Compensation:

• Salary: $192,000
• Competitive Equity Package
• Comprehensive Benefits Plan

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