Staff Software Development Engineer - SDM
$150,000–$185,000 year
RemoteUnited States
Job Summary
Lead the architecture and technical direction of highly concurrent, distributed backend systems in Go, setting engineering standards across StrongDM and Delinea. Drive design decisions for the proxy data plane and control-plane services, evaluating tradeoffs on complex technical problems while serving as a subject matter expert on secure network protocols and cryptographic systems. Partner with architects, product managers, and DevOps/SRE leadership to shape multi-quarter system roadmaps, translating business priorities into concrete technical strategy. Lead code and design reviews, hold a high bar for performance and security, and mentor engineers across the team. Investigate and resolve challenging technical issues in distributed, multi-cloud production environments, often requiring evaluation of ambiguous tradeoffs. Author and maintain architectural documentation that informs decisions beyond your immediate team.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in computer science, software engineering, or related technical discipline
- 8+ years of professional experience working as a software engineer
- Deep expertise in Go (Golang)
- Deep expertise in distributed systems
- Deep expertise in backend/network service development at scale
- Demonstrated experience architecting highly concurrent, distributed systems
- Ability to exercise independent judgment on methods, techniques, and evaluation criteria
- Experience with Go's standard networking and cryptography libraries
- Strong understanding of distributed systems
- Strong understanding of network protocols
- Strong understanding of API design
- Ability to reason about tradeoffs across an entire system
- Experience with AWS (or another major cloud provider)
- Experience with cloud-native deployment models at production scale
- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills
- Ability to convey advanced technical concepts
- Ability to persuade diverse stakeholders and audiences
- Proven ability to build formal working relationships
- Proven ability to coordinate across multiple teams and functions
- Conceptual thinking skills sufficient to understand advanced technical issues
- Conceptual thinking skills sufficient to understand broader implications for the business
- Demonstrated track record mentoring engineers
- Recognized as a subject matter expert others turn to for guidance
- Upon conditional offer of employment, candidates are required to complete comprehensive criminal background check
- Upon conditional offer of employment, candidates are required to complete verification of education
- Upon conditional offer of employment, candidates are required to complete verification of employment
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) beyond a single provider
- Experience establishing or influencing engineering-wide standards for Terraform automation
- Experience establishing or influencing engineering-wide standards for CI/CD pipelines
- Deep expertise with secure protocols, mTLS and PKI
- Deep expertise with secrets management (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault)
- Deep expertise with credential brokering
- Familiarity with proxying database, SSH/RDP, Kubernetes, and HTTP traffic
- Experience building CLI or desktop client tooling
- Experience shaping Zero Trust architecture strategy
- Experience shaping just-in-time access models
- Experience shaping policy-as-code (e.g., Cedar) at an organizational level
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