Edge/Traffic Engineer (RUST)

Staffing Science; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Staffing Science is seeking a Senior Rust Engineer to own edge proxy and load balancing systems. You will work on a high-traffic Rust reverse proxy, handling TCP, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and WebSockets for many customer apps, with global load balancing and multi-tenant isolation.

You will also contribute to TLS automation via ACME, reduce debt, and operate in a team with on-call responsibilities. Expect deep networking, distributed systems thinking, and autonomy.

Qualifications

• Production Rust experience with async Rust, Tokio, Hyper or Tower.
• Hands-on proxy or load balancer engineering (not just user-level config).
• Deep understanding of TCP, HTTP/1.1/2, WebSockets, TLS; production traffic debugging.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve a high-traffic Rust reverse proxy (L4/L7) on Tokio/Hyper/Tower.
• Improve cross-machine load balancing with real-time data across global nodes.
• Strengthen multi-tenant isolation to prevent noisy-neighbor effects.
• Develop automatic TLS and ACME certificate issuance.
• Address technical debt while scaling usage safely.

Skills

Production Rust

Async Rust

Tokio

HTTP/2

Networking fundamentals

Load balancing

Distributed systems

Senior engineer

Edge proxy

BGP & Anycast

TLS/ACME

Observability

CRDTs / gossip

Tools

Pingora / linkerd2-proxy

Envoy / HAProxy

rustls / quinn

Tokio / Hyper / Tower

WebSockets / TLS

Job description

Senior Rust Engineer, Edge Proxy and Load Balancing

What you'll do

Most of your time will go to the edge proxy and load balancing, with some BGP operations mixed in.

• Build and improve a high-traffic Rust reverse proxy (L4/L7) built on Tokio, Hyper, and Tower. It handles raw TCP, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and WebSockets for a very large number of customer apps.
• Improve how traffic is balanced across machines worldwide, using load data that changes every second.
• Strengthen multi-tenant isolation so one busy customer cannot starve its neighbors of capacity.
• Work on automatic TLS and certificate issuance through ACME.
• Pay down technical debt in the proxy while usage grows quickly, without putting the platform at risk.
• Learn and operate the team's eventually consistent, gossip-based database that distributes routing state across the global fleet. Writing code for it is not expected at first.
• Take part in a one-week on-call rotation shared across the whole team, covering both the proxy and the routing database.

Required experience

This is a senior role with no ramp-up period on the core skills. You must have all of the following:

• Production Rust, from day one. You have shipped and maintained Rust services in production, not just side projects or tutorials. You are comfortable with async Rust and have worked directly with Tokio, and ideally Hyper and Tower.
• Hands-on proxy or load balancer engineering. You have built, extended, or owned the code of a reverse proxy, load balancer, API gateway, service mesh proxy, or edge networking system. Configuring NGINX or Envoy as a user does not count.
• Deep networking fundamentals. You understand TCP, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, WebSockets, and TLS at the protocol level, and you can debug traffic problems in production.
• Production on-call experience. You have carried a pager for a high-traffic system, handled real incidents, and written postmortems. You think about how a system fails and how to contain that failure before you think about new features.
• Distributed systems judgment. You are comfortable in a large, complex codebase where state and invariants span nodes on different continents, and you can reason clearly about tradeoffs.
• Seniority. Typically 6+ years of software engineering, with significant time on networking or infrastructure systems. You work independently and choose your own priorities; no one will hand you tickets.
• Experience on Rust proxies such as Pingora or linkerd2-proxy, or deep work on Envoy, HAProxy, or similar alongside production Rust.
• Contributions to tokio, hyper, tower, rustls, quinn, or other Rust networking crates.
• Multi-tenant traffic management: rate limiting, concurrency limits, and noisy-neighbor isolation.
• Gossip protocols (such as SWIM), CRDTs, replication, eventually consistent systems, or replicated SQLite.
• BGP and Anycast operations at an edge provider, CDN, or large network.
• WireGuard, overlay networks, QUIC, or HTTP/3.
• Observability for high-traffic systems: metrics, tracing, and eBPF.

This role is not a fit if

• Your Rust experience is limited to side projects. Strong C++ or Go proxy engineers without production Rust will not be considered.
• Your networking background is configuring routers and switches (Cisco, Juniper, CCNA-type work) rather than writing networking software.
• You have not been on call for a production system, or you do not want to be.