Senior Rust Engineer — Secure, Distributed Systems

Richmond Square Consulting Limited; Leckhampton; Hybrid; GBP 95,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonus

Pension plan

Life assurance

25 days annual leave

Bank Holidays

Flexible working hours

Hybrid work setup

Job summary

Richmond Square Consulting Limited is seeking an experienced Senior Rust Developer to join a growing engineering team working on next-generation national defence technologies. The role is a genuine technical position in a flexible hybrid setup in Cheltenham, with a basic salary in the £95,000–£100,000 range, plus discretionary bonus and pension.

You will design high-performance Rust software, build distributed systems, and ensure secure communications.

Qualifications

• Strong commercial experience in Rust development / systems programming.
• Experience with ownership, borrowing, lifetimes and traits.
• Experience with concurrency and asynchronous Rust.
• Experience with Zenoh / Eclipse Zenoh.
• Experience with distributed messaging and publish/subscribe architectures.
• Experience with secure software engineering / secure-by-design principles.
• Experience with TLS / SSL, mTLS, PKI and X.509.
• Experience with certificate authorities, certificate chains and trust stores.
• Experience with applied cryptography and secure key management.
• Experience with network programming and TCP/IP.
• Experience with Linux-based development.
• Experience with software architecture, debugging and complex problem solving.
• Experience with automated testing, Git and CI/CD.
• Experience with technologies such as rustls, OpenSSL, RustCrypto, Tokio, HSMs, TPMs, Zero Trust architectures, embedded/edge systems or other high-assurance software environments is particularly useful.
• Previous experience within Defence, National Security, Government or another security-sensitive environment is advantageous.
• Ability to obtain and maintain the appropriate level of UK National Security Vetting for the position.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop high-performance software using Rust.
• Build distributed and networked systems.
• Work with Zenoh / Eclipse Zenoh, including publish/subscribe and peer-to-peer communications.
• Develop secure communications using TLS 1.2/1.3, mTLS, PKI and X.509 certificates.
• Work with certificate lifecycle management, trust chains and secure key management.
• Apply cryptographic principles including encryption, hashing, digital signatures and key exchange.
• Develop resilient network services using TCP/IP.
• Investigate complex software, networking, security and performance issues.
• Identify and reduce technical, architectural and cyber-security risks.
• Maintain high standards across secure coding, automated testing and code review.
• Provide technical guidance across multidisciplinary engineering teams.

Skills

Rust development

Ownership & borrowing

Concurrency

Zenoh

Distributed messaging

Secure software engineering

TLS / SSL / PKI / X.509

Network programming

Linux

Automated testing

CI/CD

Git

Cryptography

Tokio

HSMs / TPMs

Zero Trust architectures

Defence / National Security context

Tools

Rustls

OpenSSL

RustCrypto

Eclipse Zenoh

TLS/PKI tooling

Job description

Richmond Square Consulting Limited is seeking an experienced Senior Rust Developer to join a growing engineering team working on next-generation national defence technologies. The role is a genuine technical position in a flexible hybrid setup in Cheltenham, with a basic salary in the £95,000–£100,000 range, plus discretionary bonus and pension.

You will design high-performance Rust software, build distributed systems, and ensure secure communications.