Staff Engineer - Rust

Ockam OverviewTL;DR - Ockam builds developer tools within the security space with the objective of enabling trusted communication between any applications. We believe in building trust when it comes to our product as well as the culture we have for our teams. We’d love for you to join us on our journey! Ockam’s vision is to build a future where all applications can be interoperable - everywhere. We empower developers with simple tools so they can create applications that Trust data in motion. Ockam equips development teams with the tools they need to easily build a “trust architecture” within their applications to ensure that data that moves over complex, multi-hop, multi-protocol routes is end-to-end encrypted, mutually authenticated, secure, and private.
We are excited to announce our Series A fundraise of $12.5M from Craft Ventures, Future Ventures, SineWave Ventures, OCV and Okta Ventures! As Ockam continues to grow, our values and virtues stay constant as our guiding lights. It is deeply important for us to maintain and enhance a culture in which everyone is respected, valued and empowered. And has a great time working with our kind and talented team members!
About the OpportunityIn this role, you will be the most senior engineer on our Rust team and will be responsible for designing and developing Ockam's Rust Open Source library and Command Line. This is an ideal role if you are an experienced staff or principal level engineer and are responsible for a large Rust library. In this role you will work with a team of engineers that you’ll be guiding and mentoring. You’ll be taking large and possibly nebulous concepts and turning them into delivered features and products. You have worked on large projects with many customers and have experience in scaling engineering best practices. This role will require solving challenging problems in areas like library API design, type systems, protocol design, actor model, async execution, abstraction, loose coupling, pluggable modules and more. You will be part of a team of senior engineers who have deep expertise across distributed systems, messaging protocols, network protocols, cryptographic protocols, embedded systems etc. You will be collaborating with them to deliver secure, well-documented, easy to use Open Source code. This role involves architecture, interface design, writing code, responsibility for testing, and publishing documentation. Everyone on the Ockam team takes responsibility for their parts from end-to-end, including the creation of long term objectives, issues in GitHub, task management, and summaries of key results.

What We're Looking For

• Expertise in architecting and designing APIs in Rust
• Knowledge of Type Systems, Generics, Futures, Async/Await, Tokio
• Deep understanding of library API and CLI design and documentation
• Built components in complex codebases
• Used modern build systems, CI/CD pipelines and DevOps
• Consumed and contributed to open source codebases
• Experienced with Git and GitHub workflows

Experience

• 15+ years of experience building low-level and backend systems
• Distributed systems, Actor-based concurrent systems and Messaging protocols
• Provisioning and operating basic cloud services in AWS, Azure or Google Cloud
• Familiarity with multiple programming languages

Your Roadmap at Ockam, within 1 month, you'll:

• Learn about how Ockam’s Rust libraries, Ockam Protocols and Ockam Orchestrator work.
• Have 1x1s and pairing sessions with the team members that you’ll be working with closely and get to know your engineering peers.
• Do a deep dive into the code base and learn more about the inner workings of our Rust libraries.
• Learn about what processes our team currently has in place and how we get work done.
• Work closely with our CTO, Mrinal Wadhwa having deep technical and product conversations
• Tackle your first ticket by committing code to one of our repos.

Within 3 months, you'll:

• Gain a robust understanding of the needs of the Rust library
• Design, architect, and deliver your first large feature
• Begin putting in place and implementing Engineering best practices that will help our team members
• Establish strong async and sync communication rhythms with your peers and management, practicing transparency and visibility in your progress and areas of focus
• Celebrate the major win of having your work being used and valued by our users
• Solicit feedback from your peers, including other engineers and teammates in your product team, and support your team through thoughtful feedback

Within 6 months, you'll:

• Elevate the work of the team and become a subject matter expert
• Have a deep