Software Engineer, Spectrum
The Software Engineer on Confidential Client's Spectrum team will develop and maintain high-scale Layer 4 proxy systems that handle TCP and UDP traffic, providing DDoS mitigation, TLS termination, and global network performance. This role involves building and operating critical packet processing infrastructure, collaborating across teams to evolve the product, and ensuring operational excellence at massive scale.
About Careertakes
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Applicants for this role may also receive access to additional matched opportunities through the Careertakes platform.
About the Role
Confidential Client is seeking a Software Engineer to join the Spectrum team on the Packet Processing organization in Austin, TX. This role owns and evolves a high-scale Layer 4 reverse proxy platform that handles massive TCP/UDP traffic volumes. You’ll work on both edge dataplane components and control-plane systems, collaborate cross-functionally with traffic management, SRE, and security teams, and help shape the roadmap for non-HTTP traffic at scale.
What You’ll Do
- Own and enhance the Spectrum edge dataplane: TCP/UDP connection acceptance and forwarding, TLS termination, PROXY protocol, connection accounting, and eBPF integrations (primarily Go).
- Build and maintain Spectrum control-plane services: application configuration APIs, provisioning, and global config push systems.
- Design and implement cross-dataplane integrations (e.g., L4 load balancing, IP transit integration, accelerated origin paths).
- Improve operational excellence: observability, analytics pipelines, on-call support, incident response, and technical debt reduction.
- Diagnose and optimize performance and connection lifecycle issues in production systems.
- Partner with Packet Processing, DDoS, DNS, Core SRE, and Edge SRE to deliver reliable network services.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- Proven experience building and shipping large-scale, highly distributed systems.
- Strong programming experience in Go; familiarity with Rust is a plus.
- Deep understanding of L3/L4 networking: TCP, UDP, IP, NAT, anycast, connection state, and packet flows.
- Hands-on experience with Linux networking primitives: sockets, eBPF, network namespaces, netfilter/nftables, tc.
- Experience designing and integrating RESTful APIs and backend services.
- Comfortable operating software in production: on-call rotations, incident response, root-cause analysis.
- Excellent debugging and performance-optimization skills, especially around high-throughput connection handling.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills; ability to collaborate across teams and land shared solutions.
Nice to Have
- Experience with TLS termination, PROXY protocol, or L4/L7 proxies (Envoy, HAProxy, nginx stream).
- Background with ClickHouse, Kafka, or large-scale connection/flow analytics.
- Experience building globally-distributed KV or config-push systems.
- Prior work on DDoS mitigation, anycast routing, or L4 load balancing.
- Contributions to open-source networking or proxy projects.
Compensation & Benefits
Compensation may be adjusted depending on work location. This role is eligible to participate in equity programs. Confidential Client offers a comprehensive benefits package for U.S.-based employees, which typically includes medical, dental, and vision coverage; flexible and commuter spending accounts; family-forming benefits; mental health support; short- and long-term disability; life and accident insurance; 401(k) retirement savings; flexible paid time off; and leave programs including parental and medical leave. Benefits may vary by location.
Additional Information
- Employment type: Full-time.
- Location: Austin, TX (onsite or hybrid as defined by the client).
- Offers may be conditioned on the candidate’s ability to receive software or technology controlled under U.S. export laws without sponsorship for an export license. Confidential Client will provide details at offer stage as needed.
- Confidential Client is committed to inclusive hiring and will provide reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.
Equal Opportunity & Hiring Transparency
Careertakes and our client are Equal Opportunity Employers committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce. We prohibit discrimination or harassment of any kind. To support a fair and efficient hiring process, AI tools may be used to assist with application review or resume screening. These tools do not replace human decision-making. Final hiring decisions are made by people.
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