Staff SDE, Networking

dragos; United States; Remote; USD 173,000 - 211,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Competitive equity

Comprehensive benefits

Background check

Job summary

dragos is seeking a senior Staff Software Development Engineer for its Sensor Platform team. You will lead end-to-end platform initiatives on a Linux-based network sensor used in OT environments, driving reliability, latency, and data fidelity.

You will mentor peers, improve observability, and set engineering standards while collaborating across product, infrastructure, and engineering groups.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and debugging distributed systems software.
• Deep expertise in Rust for asynchronous and concurrent programming, ownership discipline, and performance-sensitive systems design.
• Experience architecting or leading a significant systems initiative end-to-end, from design to production deployment.
• Strong grasp of concurrent system design including pipelines, backpressure, and queue management.
• Hands-on experience with high-performance packet capture and Linux systems programming for low-latency workloads.
• Proven ability to lead root cause analysis on complex failures and durable fixes under production load; experience with message queuing or broker systems.
• Awareness of sensor reliability and data fidelity, security practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead major sensor platform initiatives such as high-throughput ingestion improvements, pipeline scalability, continuous capture capability, and queue management reliability.
• Own root cause analysis and postmortems for complex production issues across 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 like latency targets and reliability SLOs into concrete technical plans and milestones.
• Identify and close gaps in observability, reliability, and developer experience, building tooling to diagnose production issues faster.
• Mentor teammates through design reviews and code reviews across experience levels.

Skills

Rust

Distributed systems

Linux systems programming

Root cause analysis

Concurrency

Message broker systems

Tools

eBPF/XDP

OpenTelemetry

Kubernetes

AF_XDP

Job description

Role overview

A senior Staff Software Development Engineer role on a Sensor Platform team that builds a high-performance, Linux-based network sensor for operational technology and industrial control system environments. The position leads large-scale platform initiatives end-to-end, sets the technical bar for the sensor skill community, and turns goals around reliability, latency, and data fidelity into durable engineering decisions. It combines deep systems work, ownership of production quality, and cross-functional influence across product, infrastructure, and engineering peers.

Responsibilities

• Lead major sensor platform initiatives such as high-throughput ingestion improvements, pipeline scalability, continuous capture capability, and queue management reliability.


• Own root cause analysis and postmortems for complex production and canary issues spanning 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 like latency targets, new capture interface support, and reliability SLOs into concrete technical plans and delivery milestones.


• Identify and close gaps in observability, reliability, and developer experience, building tooling that helps the team diagnose production issues faster.


• Elevate the team through mentorship, design reviews, and code review across all experience levels.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience designing, developing, and debugging distributed systems software.


• Deep expertise in Rust for 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 including pipeline topologies, graceful shutdown sequencing, backpressure management, and active queue management.


• Hands-on 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 under production load, plus experience with message queuing or broker systems under production load.


• Awareness of how sensor reliability and data fidelity affect detection quality in OT network monitoring, and experience applying secure coding and cybersecurity best practices.

Nice to have

• Experience with eBPF or XDP for kernel-bypass packet processing, AF_XDP socket programming, or high-speed Linux data plane capture.


• Prior work in IC S or OT environments, industrial network protocol analysis, or related security tooling.


• Familiarity with Kubernetes, containerized sensor deployments, or edge infrastructure.


• Experience with OpenTelemetry, structured logging, or distributed tracing in production systems.


• Prior experience in a security-focused product engineering environment.

Benefits and work setup

• Remote-first team distributed across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC.


• Listed base salary of $192,000, plus a competitive equity package and a comprehensive benefits plan.


• Background check required as a condition of employment.