Senior Principal Software Engineer - Core Systems

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

Work Hours:

This position will require you to be available during core North American business hours and occasional nights and weekends for on call rotation.

Work Locations & Travel Requirements:

The preferred locations for this position are:

• San Francisco, CA

Fastly currently embraces a largely hybrid model for most roles which allows employees flexibility to split their time between the office and home.

This position may require travel as required by your role or requested by your manager.

Salary:

The estimated salary range for this position if hired in the United States is $228,280 to $285,350.

Starting salary may vary based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as experience, skills, qualifications, and location.

This role may be eligible to participate in Fastly's equity and discretionary bonus programs.

Benefits:

We care about you. Fastly works hard to create a positive environment for our employees, and we think your life outside of work is important too. We support our teams with great benefits that start on the first day of your employment with Fastly. Curious about our offerings?

We offer a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance. Family planning, mental health support along with Employee Assistance Program, Insurance (Life, Disability, and Accident), a Flexible Vacation policy and up to 18 days of accrued paid sick leave are there to help support our employees. We also offer 401(k) (including company match) and an Employee Stock Purchase Program. For 2024, we offer 10 paid local holidays, 11 paid company wellness days.