Senior Principal Software Engineer - Core Systems

Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly’s edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers’ applications as close to their end-users as possible — at the edge of the Internet. The platform is designed to take advantage of the modern internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development. Fastly’s customers include many of the world’s most prominent companies, including Vimeo, Pinterest, The New York Times, and GitHub.

We're building a more trustworthy Internet. Come join us.

We are looking for a Senior Principal Engineer who thrives on designing and navigating the path from today's systems architecture to tomorrow’s strategy and cares deeply about efficiency, security and scale.

The Core Systems organization owns Fastly’s Control Plane. We are a team of backend engineers focused on management, compilation, and validation of customer configuration including propagation of that data to the edge. This role requires collaborating with multiple internal Fastly teams to support critical business initiatives. Our customers rely on these systems to ensure a performant and delightful experience for their users and it is the mission of our team to provide them with a platform that is fast, safe and engaging.

You’ll be deeply hands-on and technical, writing code, designing systems, shipping features, solving for scale and efficiency, guiding and mentoring teammates, and collaborating across the entire engineering organization. You will forge deep connections with other engineers, senior leadership, and partners across the company  

What You'll Do

• Craft architecturally sound systems to support growth to the next generation of customers
• Design and lead delivery of systems that drive our vision for scalability, security, performance and reliability in all the applications
• Provide and advocate for  solutions to strategic and sophisticated technical problems, while influencing the organization with new ideas
• Represent the Team in technical discussions across the organization
• Help identify areas of opportunity in existing products and design solutions to support those efforts
• Contribute and advocate for iterative improvements to both code and culture
• Think strategically about the technical direction of the team’s software, in alignment to Fastly’s long term goals
• Anticipate where and when systems will need to be adapted to meet our growth needs
• Craft and articulate technical strategy via design documents
• Sequence the technical building blocks required to enable durable innovation
• Guide, share knowledge, and lead teams implementing cross functional systems
• Enable outcome driven, collaborative discussions utilizing the deep technical knowledge of the teams you work with
• Mentor and provide regular feedback to engineers
• Lead by example. Be an active implementer and team member
• Partner with senior engineering leaders to build and execute in both internal and open source contexts
• Participate in an on-call rotation

What We're Looking For

• 15+ years of hands-on experience as an engineer building complex, reliable, and highly efficient systems
• Significant experience writing backend systems in Go, but also a generalist mindset with the ability to select and use the right tool for the job
  • Our tech stack includes Go and Perl, so you’ll need to support applications in both languages from day 1
• Track record of choosing pragmatic over perfect solutions to ship features on-time and unblock cross-functional initiatives
• Experience building efficient software at scale
• Proven experience building internet facing systems that are safely operated
• A strong communicator who can articulate and execute a broad technical vision
• A history of hands-on technical leadership building scalable and reliable software
• Thoughtful, customer-driven approach to design and implementation
• Expertise building, analyzing, profiling, or debugging large-scale distributed systems
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills; capable of building positive relationships with peers and leadership
• Experience mentoring, guiding, and coaching team members and a passion for learning and sharing what you’ve learned with others

We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these:

• Experience with Compilers
• Experience with AWS Ecosystem
• Experience with IAM Systems
• Experience with DNS Systems
• Experience with Varnish<