Staff Technology Exploration Engineer

Staff Technology Exploration Engineer

Remote in United States with some required travel to HQ in Sunnyvale, CA, up to once per quarter

In this role, you will explore different technology areas of interest to the business, to synthesize, communicate, and inspire people in the technology area.

Every day you will work on technology projects, researching and answering questions about technology, and communicate research results to various stakeholders of the business. 

To thrive in this role, you must be a quick learner with an ability to understand and synthesize information, and communicate results back to various business stakeholders.

About the Team:

The Office of the CTO and Security team sets the strategic technical direction of the company while keeping both Illumio and our customers secure. Those who join us represent the leader in Zero Trust Segmentation and maintain Illumio’s competitive advantage by exploring new technologies while collaborating with Engineering and Product Management.

Illumio's Office of the CTO Technology Exploration team is responsible for keeping Illumio competitive by exploring new technologies, building consensus within Illumio through proof of concepts and presentations. You will brief executives, product management and engineering on new technologies, as well as help influence and inspire product direction. The Technology Exploration team is also responsible for technical evaluation of M&A and early-stage competitive analysis. The Technology Exploration team owns Illumio Labs web portal accompanied by Illumio Labs Github repository to share insights and best practices to help the security community defend against cyberattacks.

Key Responsibilities:

The Staff Technology Exploration Engineer is a crucial member of Illumio’s Office of the CTO. It is a highly visible role providing the opportunity to work closely with company leaders and influence Illumio product direction as well as the industry by demonstrating technical thought leadership. 

• As a member of the technology exploration team, they will answer important questions about the direction and limits of technology. These questions come from all parts of the organization.  The candidate will need to understand those questions, and research and explore the technology space to be able to answer them to the satisfaction of the stakeholder and CTO.   This might involve creating proof of concepts, demos, and presentations as appropriate.  Success is turning what might be an ambiguous question into technical clarity, direction, and inspiration for the company.

• The candidate will likely be chosen to lead a CTO technology area council, which will require them to demonstrate technical leadership, and organization skills to drive a cross functional team to deliver quarterly insights in that technical area. 

• The candidate will periodically write external blogs on Illumio Labs on the prototypes they built, or technical content and opinion that matters to Illumio customers or external technical users in general.

• The candidate will attend technical conferences, meetups, and user groups, and share summaries and clear insights from those meetings with internal teams.

Experience:

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent job-related experience.

• 8+ years building distributed & scalable software and systems.

• Be the Office of the CTO public cloud subject matter expert to the internal and external teams, and expertise in AWS, Azure, GCP and related technologies like Terraform, CloudFormation, etc. with a specific focus on networking and security.

• The ability to summarize and present research clearly at different levels to the extended Illumio executive team to drive innovation within the company forward.

• The ability to drive the thought leadership program for all things in Public Cloud.

• Excellent programming, verbal, and presentation skills, and be able to independently build POC applications, publish them on GitHub, and provide technical support using Slack and GitHub.

• Lead Ideation sessions and be vocal about the latest and greatest in the public cloud technology landscape that Illumio should be exploring.

• Be flexible and open to exploring new technologies and opportunities. We value the ability to learn quickly, with little supervision (but with support of peers) and value the willingness to try and excel at new things even outside one’s technology comfort zone.

• Quickly evaluate and prototype potential technical integrations to build consensus and executive buy-in.

• Write blogs on Illumio Labs website accompanied by relevant c