Senior Software Engineer (Go)

The internet's evolution has progressed through distinct phases. Cisco became synonymous with the internet itself, providing the foundational infrastructure that enabled client-server architectures and established the backbone of global connectivity. Subsequently, API gateways and platforms like MuleSoft facilitated human-to-web commerce. We are now entering a phase defined by autonomous agent-to-agent communication, a fundamental shift towards interconnected intelligent systems.

Just as Cisco and API gateway technologies defined their respective eras, Tetrate is now defining the next generation of the internet. We are building the foundational platform that enables secure, scalable, and efficient communication between Large Language Models (LLMs) and autonomous agents. By architecting the control plane for these complex interactions, we are establishing the core infrastructure for the next phase of interconnected AI systems.

We are seeking backend software engineers experienced in building distributed systems using Golang and gRPC.

We are building a secure, robust, and highly available service mesh platform for mission-critical enterprise applications spanning both legacy and modern infrastructure. The Management Plane team is responsible for building the main experience of the platform, including the public-facing APIs users consume to configure, observe, and interact with the mesh, as well as the main workflows and processes that provide multi-tenancy and security to our hybrid and multi-cloud service mesh.

Bridging the gap between complex large infrastructures and flexible but manageable and meaningful APIs is the main challenge you will be solving. If you care about user experience, like public API design, writing quality code, and making complex things look simple for end-users, you'll find this role to be a fit for your wants.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop service mesh products, ensuring scalability, security, and reliability.
• Collaborate closely with product management, UX, and cross-functional teams to design and implement public APIs that will be used to configure all the aspects of a service mesh: networking, security, and observability.
• Implement new product features that will have a direct impact on customers.
• Mentor and guide a team of engineers, fostering a culture of excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Drive the adoption of best practices in software development, including performance optimization, CI/CD, security, and observability.
• Engage with the open-source community and contribute to projects like Istio, Envoy, and Kubernetes to enhance our ecosystem.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues, optimize system performance, and drive root cause analysis for distributed systems.

Required Skills

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 7+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Expertise in Golang (preferred) or C++, with strong systems-level programming experience.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes, Istio, Envoy, and modern service mesh architectures.
• Experience with multi-cluster networking, security (mTLS, RBAC, Zero Trust), and control plane/data plane architectures.
• Strong knowledge of gRPC, HTTP/2, WebAssembly (WASM), and API Gateway technologies.
• Good understanding of networking protocols, concepts, consistency properties of distributed systems, techniques to identify and reconcile configuration drifts.
• Proven ability to deliver complex distributed systems in high-scale production environments.
• Experience with performance profiling and optimization of high-throughput distributed systems, leveraging tools like pprof, and eBPF tracing.
• Experience with declarative infrastructure and GitOps practices, using Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, or Flux.
• Strong fundamentals-based problem-solving skills; ability to break down complex problems using first-principles thinking rather than conventional approaches.
• Passion for mentoring engineers, driving technical excellence, and fostering a high-performance engineering culture.
• Ego-free collaboration; ability to contribute across different areas outside of direct expertise.
• Demonstrate bias-to-action and avoid analysis-paralysis; Drive action to the finish line with high quality and on time
• You are ego-less when searching for the best ideas; You contribute effectively outside of your specialty; You think about solving problems from the standpoint of the best outcome for the team
• Values autonomy and results over process

Qualifications

• Experience contributing to open-source projects, especially in the Istio, Envoy, or Kubernetes ecosystem.
• Expertise in security best practices in service mesh environments, including SPIFFE/SPIRE, OPA, and Zero Trust architectures.
• Deep networking expertise, including L3/L4/L7 protocols, DNS, IP tables, and service-to-service communication strategies.
• Expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Linux networking, eBPF, and performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience with WASM extensions for Envoy, enabling custom policies, logging, or traffic control mechanisms.
• Experience contributing to open source projects is a plus.
• Experience with authentication technologies such as OIDC, and authorization systems such as RBAC, ABAC is a plus.
• Experience using SQL relational databases and Key/Value datastores.
• Expertise in large-scale observability solutions, including Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and distributed tracing methodologies.
• Background in chaos engineering and resiliency testing, using tools like Chaos Mesh, Litmus, or Gremlin.
• Strong understanding of multi-tenancy, service segmentation, and access control in Kubernetes-based environments.

Location: We are a fully distributed company with a presence in 15 countries globally, and we welcome talent from anywhere. This role specifically requires coverage of the North American time zone, so you must be willing to work within those hours.