Senior Software Engineer, Distributed Systems

What you'll do

• Design and implement features for the Distributed Service Bus, including gossip protocols and link-state routing.
• Build and extend the gRPC proxy layer to enable transparent service communication over the mesh.
• Debug complex distributed networking issues across tactical radios, UDP/TCP transports, and cloud infrastructure.
• Optimize protocols for bandwidth-constrained RF links using compression and priority-based QoS scheduling.
• Write RFCs and technical design documents for new protocol features and API surfaces.
• Build deterministic simulation harnesses to run production code in reproducible test environments.
• Improve observability using Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, and CLI tooling for live mesh inspection.
• Contribute to the security posture of the communication layer through packet signing and end-to-end encryption.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proficiency in a systems programming language such as Rust, C, C++, or Go.
• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals including TCP/UDP, socket programming, MTU, multicast, and TLS/mTLS.
• Experience building or maintaining distributed systems like message buses, RPC frameworks, or consensus protocols.
• Familiarity with asynchronous programming models such as async/await, event loops, and futures.
• Comfort working with Protocol Buffers and/or gRPC.
• Ability to read packet captures and use network debugging tools like tcpdump or Wireshark.
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret security clearance.
• Production experience writing Rust (preferred).
• Experience with gossip protocols, epidemic broadcast, or peer-to-peer overlay networks (preferred).
• Familiarity with link-state routing protocols (OSPF, IS-IS) or inter-domain routing (BGP) (preferred).
• Experience with deterministic simulation or property-based testing of distributed systems (preferred).
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and container orchestration (preferred).