Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Backend Engineering

About the VPN Control Plane Team

We are an engineering team responsible for building and operating the systems and tools that manage our world-wide VPN infrastructure of more than 3000 physical servers in more than 150 datacenters. We:

1. Maintain an accurate inventory of resources spanning data centers, networks, and servers.
2. Decide how all resources should be configured, then ensure that they in fact are configured as expected. All automatically.
3. Provide the necessary data and decisions to let our client-side apps get and stay connected quickly and reliably.
4. Design, build and operate systems that enable our operations teams to deliver maximum service quality to our end-users. That includes extensive monitoring and benchmarking, including comparing our own service-quality against our competitors.

Our customers are internal:

1. Engineering teams building native client-side apps for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Linux, Routers, and Browser Extensions.
2. Operations teams.

Here are a few highlights of challenges we face and how we go about solving them:

• Millions of active users connect to our service every day from all over the globe. That brings demanding requirements for uptime, capacity, reliability, etc.
• We have very strict requirements for protecting the privacy and security of end-users.
• Our infrastructure is very diverse, especially since we’re based in so many different datacenters around the world. We automate all processes 100%.
• We’ve been practicing test-driven development and code-reviews for many years. We very much value code quality and test coverage.

Here’s some examples of the type of work you’d do if you join the team:

• Our internal tool supports authentication via Google Auth. Move to using Okta SSO instead.
• We currently support management of IPv4 addresses on our VPN server. Extend support for IPv6.
• Upgrade our internal tool from Rails 6.1 to 7 and then later 8.
• We were one of the first adopters of Terraform in the company even before it became mainstream. Upgrade our terraform version and then move to a proper CI/CD setup for our infrastructure.
• Build event driven systems so that we can respond to changes in infrastructure health within seconds.
• Extend how we model our infrastructure so that we can make more efficient use of our Physical Servers.

Responsibilities of this position

• Feature Development: Work on our internal ServerAdmin tool building new features to support Operations Team to be more effective. ServerAdmin is built on Ruby on Rails. New services will be built in Rust where appropriate. 
• Build clean and high quality code: Ensure that the code is well written and structured which allows the team to iterate quickly on projects.
• DevOps: Consistently improve our development lifecycle by fine tuning the testing and provisioning process with declarative infrastructure-as-code.
• Code-reviews: We invest in spreading knowledge around the team, and keeping our code easy to read, test, and maintain.
• Continuous Delivery: we use TDD, logic is tested automatically and we deliver continuously.

Desired skills and experience

• You have at least 6 years of experience in Backend Software Engineering. While we understand that time alone doesn’t determine capability, in our experience, the breadth, depth, and maturity required for Senior or Staff roles typically develop over time through exposure to a wide range of challenges. For this reason, we use experience as one of our filtering criteria, though we remain open to exceptional candidates with slightly less traditional backgrounds.
• You’re a good software developer in server-side applications. It doesn’t matter much to us which technology stacks you’re currently most proficient in. That only impacts the length of your onboarding cycle. “Good” means: You can describe almost any requirement as an automated test. You have a proven track record of creating elegant architectural solutions to complex problems.
• Experience with Ruby on Rails.
• Experience with Terraform or OpenTofu for Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience with AWS.
• Experience with Github Actions.
• Have strong English communication skills, both written and verbal.

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