Staff Software Engineer - Backend Networking

Dragos; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 173,000 - 211,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits plan

Equity package

Remote-friendly

Job summary

Dragos seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead large-scale Sensor Platform initiatives that process OT/ICS traffic in real time. You will own designs from inception to production, driving reliability, latency, and data fidelity in a high-throughput Linux environment.

You will mentor engineers, set coding standards, and collaborate with product and infra teams to deliver durable engineering solutions across the Sensor codebase.

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.
• Proven experience architecting or leading a significant systems initiative end-to-end.
• 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 failures and drive durable fixes.
• Experience with message queuing or broker systems under production load.
• Awareness of how sensor reliability and data fidelity affect detection quality in ICS/OT networks.
• Demonstrated experience applying cybersecurity best practices, including secure coding and data protection.

Responsibilities

• Lead large-scale Sensor Platform initiatives, incl. ingestion improvements, pipeline scalability, and queue reliability.
• Own root cause analysis and postmortems for production/canary issues in the capture pipeline and broker integration.
• Set standards for documentation, test harnesses, observability, and performance benchmarks across the sensor codebase.
• Translate business goals into concrete technical plans and delivery milestones.
• Identify and close gaps in observability, reliability, and developer experience with tooling.
• Mentor team members through design reviews and code reviews across experience levels.

Skills

Rust

Distributed systems

Asynchronous programming

Linux systems programming

Concurrency

Performance optimization

Mentorship

Root cause analysis

System architecture

Tools

Message queues

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 S/OT network monitoring environments.
• Demonstrated experience applying cybersecurity best practices, including secure coding, data protection, and awareness of common threats and vulnerabilities.

Compensation

Salary: $192,000Competitive Equity PackageComprehensive Benefits Plan#LI-JF1 #LI-REMOTEDragos 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.