Senior Principal Engineer - Compute

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.

Fastly’s Compute Platform is the ultimate flexible edge compute platform. Our unique serverless platform scales workloads globally, without our customers lifting a single finger to manage their edge infrastructure. The platform is a generic compute platform, primarily built in Rust, that executes arbitrary WebAssembly programs across our global POP footprint. In partnership with the WebAssembly community, we’re developing new ecosystem capabilities and expanding first-class programming language and tooling support for Fastly’s Compute Platform.  

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 everything from efficiency and scale to the developer experience our customers have when writing programs that run at our edge. You will make a massive impact on the entire organization - Fastly’s Compute engine is not just used by our customers, it is the substrate that Fastly builds on internally - the underpinning of all of Fastly’s Edge

You will drive the architecture of the Fastly Compute Platform. You’ll be deeply hands-on and technical - writing code, designing systems, shipping features, solving for scale and efficiency, collaborating with engineers in and outside the team and guiding and mentoring junior teammates. We are a distributed team that prioritizes customer experience, reliability and efficiency and working together.  You will act as the technical leader to the organization, partnering with the Senior Director of Compute Platform, Senior Managers and team leads. You will keep the goals of the greater engineering organization at top of mind while forging deep connections with other senior principal Engineers, senior leadership, and engineers across the company. 

What You'll Do: 

• Maintain a broad understanding of how critical systems work together - your work will span everything from scaling our platform infrastructure, WebAssembly, and the Fastly Compute SDKs
• Design, implement, and maintain critical Compute systems and features with a focus on performance, resilience and scalability
• Anticipate where and when systems will need to be adapted to meet our growth needs
• Articulate technical strategy via design documents
• Sequence the technical building blocks required to enable durable innovation
• Guide, share knowledge, and lead teams toward 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
• Work with engineering and product leadership across the company
• Help guide and debug the organization to successfully implement the vision
• Partner with Sr Engineering leaders to build and execute in both internal & open source contexts

What We're Looking For: 

• 10+ years of hands-on experience as an engineer building complex, reliable, and highly efficient systems
• Recent experience developing applications that are deployed on bare metal servers
• Recent experience with systems programming languages such as Rust, C or C++
• A strong communicator who can articulate and execute on broad technical vision
• A collaborative leader and problem solving starting from first principles
• Demonstrated success choosing pragmatic solutions over perfect solutions to ship timely features
• Someone who balances the need for collaboration while avoiding design by committee or autocratic decision making
• Experience traversing a matrixed organization in order to drive meaningful technical change
• A customer centric mindset - our primary users are developers! 
• Experience building software that makes efficient use of system resources in order to scale.
• A grounding in open source ecosystems, community specific tooling and trends
• Someone with proven experience building systems that are easily operated

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