Staff Software Engineer - Backend Networking

Dragos, Inc.; Lennox Park (MD); Remote; USD 173,000 - 211,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Equity Package

Comprehensive Benefits Plan

Job summary

Dragos, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Sensor Platform. You will lead large-scale initiatives, own critical production issues, and set engineering standards across the team.

The role emphasizes Rust expertise, distributed systems depth, and mentoring across experience levels, with a remote-first, North America-wide team.

Qualifications

• 8+ years designing, developing, and debugging distributed systems.
• Deep Rust expertise across asynchronous and concurrent programming.
• Experience leading significant systems initiatives end-to-end.
• Strong grasp of concurrent design, backpressure, and queues.
• Experience with high-performance packet capture and Linux.
• Ability to drive durable fixes after production incidents.
• Experience with message queuing or broker systems.
• Awareness of cybersecurity best practices in coding and data protection.

Responsibilities

• Lead large-scale Sensor Platform initiatives from design to production.
• Own root cause analysis and postmortems for complex issues.
• Set standards for docs, tests, observability, and benchmarks.
• Translate business goals into technical plans and milestones.
• Close gaps in observability, reliability, and developer tooling.
• Mentor teammates through design/code reviews.

Skills

Rust programming

Distributed systems design

Leadership & mentorship

Linux systems programming

Root cause analysis

Performance optimization

Job description

At Dragos, the mission is personal. The systems we protect deliver the water you drink, power your home, and keep the hospitals your community depends on running. Those critical infrastructure systems that power our civilization around the world are under attack every day by adversaries. When those systems fail, people are immediately at risk. We are the global leader in xOT cybersecurity, combining technology, threat intelligence, and expert services. The people here chose this work because they understand what is at stake. Here, you will find a remote-first mission-driven team across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and APAC built on authenticity, transparency, and trust. If safeguarding the systems that protect your family, friends, and community is the kind of work that matters to you, you are in the right place.

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 IC/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

#LI-JF1 #LI-REMOTE

Dragos is an Equal Opportunity Employer and considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetics, or any other basis forbidden under federal, state, or local laws. All new hires must pass a background check as a condition of employment.