Jobs and Careers

Principal Software Engineering - Rust Systems Engineer

Burlington, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 3 Jun 2026

💰 $189,000/yr($170,000/yr – $189,000/yr)

About the role

We are Progress (Nasdaq: PRGS) - the trusted provider of software that enables our customers to develop, deploy and manage responsible, AI-powered applications and experiences with agility and ease.

We’re proud to have a diverse, global team where we value the individual and enrich our culture by considering varied perspectives because we believe people power progress. Join us as a Principal Software Engineer – Rust Systems Engineer and help us do what we do best: propelling business forward.  This will be a hybrid role working between your home office and our Burlington MA headquarters. Candidates must be local to that office to be considered as we can’t provide any relocation packages at this time.

Progress is currently hiring a Rust Systems Engineer to join our OpenEdge Core Engineering team. This is an opportunity for an expert systems programmer who wants to make a lasting impact by introducing Rust into a 30-year-old, mission-critical production database engine — and who has the technical leadership skills to bring an entire engineering organization along for the journey.

Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS) is a 30+ year strong software company headquartered in Burlington, MA. Our core product, OpenEdge, is a mature, multi-platform RDBMS engine powering thousands of mission-critical business applications worldwide across healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and government. The codebase spans 200+ subsystems and 10,000+ C/C++ source files — running on Linux x86_64 and Windows with a heritage of reliability and strict backward compatibility.

We are at a strategic inflection point: selectively introducing Rust into the OpenEdge engine to improve memory safety, unlock new platforms (macOS, ARM/Graviton, NUMA), and build new subsystems (Apache Iceberg, Avro, Kafka CDC) on a modern foundation — while preserving the stability our customers depend on.

You will be embedded in the OpenEdge Core Engineering team — the group responsible for the internals of the database engine, server operations, shared-memory IPC, multi-threaded utilities, and enterprise features such as partitioning, multi-tenancy, disaster recovery, and security. You will serve as the Rust technical lead across multiple sub-teams: Iceberg/Avro, PASOE/Transport, Platform Portability, and Kafka/CDC. You will also found and lead the Rust Guild — a weekly cross-team learning and code-review forum whose goal is to grow 3–4 existing C/C++ engineers into independent Rust contributors within twelve months.

In this role, you will:

Rust Platform & Build Integration

Integrate Rust (Cargo-based workflows) into the existing CMK (custom Make) build system so Rust shared libraries (.so/.dll) compile, link, and ship alongside 200+ C subsystems across Linux x86_64 and Windows 64-bit.
Define and standardize Rust ↔ C FFI architecture, including:
- Extern "C" boundary design
- Auto-generated C headers (via cbindgen)
- Error-handling conventions
- Memory ownership and lifetime rules
- Establish Rust as a first-class, supportable language within the core database engine.

Core Systems Libraries

Design and deliver production-grade Rust shared libraries that replace legacy C implementations, including:
- Compression: A Rust-based zstd-backed compression library replacing legacy RDC with drop-in C APIs.
- JSON Parsing: A memory-safe, multi-threaded Rust JSON parser using serde_json to eliminate known leak and corruption vectors from legacy YAJL-based components.
- Avro Serialization: A foundational Avro encode/decode layer supporting OpenEdge ↔ Apache Avro type mappings for Apache Iceberg integration.
Own benchmarking, validation, and parity testing to ensure Rust replacements meet or exceed legacy performance and stability.

Platform & Architecture Leadership

Architect and lead a Rust-based platform systems layer replacing System V IPC with modern, cross-platform primitives (mmap, POSIX shared memory, futex-style synchronization).
Enable:
- macOS developer builds
- ARM / Graviton production deployments with significant cost-efficiency gains
Design NUMA-aware memory allocation strategies for multi-socket, high-throughput production servers using hwloc.
Guide Tier-3 Rust crates covering cloud file I/O, Iceberg table operations, and engine integration bridges.

Async & Networking Modernization

Architect an async gRPC server using tonic, tower, and tokio modernize the PASOE data path and replace Tomcat/HTTP-based flows.
Design middleware layers for authentication (JWT), observability, an