Lead Platform Engineer

ZeroTier is a successful startup originally founded in 2015 as an Open Source project and is now backed by leading venture capital investors including Bonfire Ventures, Anorak Ventures and First In Capital. Our mission is to directly connect the world’s devices (over 2 million in over 230 countries today) and enable a new era of decentralized computing. On Github, we have over 13,900 stars. 

The primary product, ZeroTierOne, is a secure network overlay that allows you to manage all of your network resources as if they were on the same LAN. The software-defined solution can be deployed in minutes from anywhere and empowers your team to create global private networks that connect your devices directly to each other, no matter where they are in the world.

The ZeroTier engineering team is looking for a Lead Platform Engineer to take technical ownership of the ZeroTier Central platform. Central serves as the control panel our customers use to create and manage their ZeroTierOne networks, and is core to our community and commercial users' deployments of ZeroTier.

Our team is distributed across the US and EU, and we use modern software engineering practices and tools to support asynchronous remote collaboration. Every team member at ZeroTier is expected to work independently and leverage shared issue tracking, documentation, and automated testing to contribute to our shared base of reliable, well-defined libraries and APIs.

Preference for this role will be shown to qualified candidates in the EU and in particular ZeroTier’s operating hub in the Netherlands. We encourage you to apply for this position if you feel you are a match, regardless of location.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• In this role, you'll architect and implement core features of the Central API and associated systems that drive it. In your day-to-day work on the platform, you'll help define and document new API endpoints, implement any new business and data-access logic to provide them, and support our frontend and downstream API consumers in utilizing it. As the most senior member of the team you’ll coordinate and mentor more junior members, and be the technical point of contact for other teams in the organization. This is not a management role and you should expect to spend the majority of your time building.




• Central is written primarily in Go as a monolithic API backend to support both the Central UI and public API. We deploy to cloud platforms using managed Kubernetes and PostgreSQL for reliability and portability. We also use additional cloud-native and standalone services to power some Central features, including Redis, Temporal, and Casbin.




• You should also be comfortable working with and improving automated build and deployment workflows. We package our production systems in Linux containers and deploy using modern CI/CD pipelines to make getting code into production fast and safe.




• We support each member working in the style and time zones that support their personal needs, though we do expect attendance of team meetings during hours that overlap with Pacific US working hours. Similarly, while we design Central and other core services for reliability and scalability, some on-call support outside of normal working hours may be required, especially during major feature deployments, upgrades, and incident response.

EXPERIENCE

• Advanced knowledge of best practices for Go service development, including when to apply design patterns (interfaces, middleware) for maintainability and modularity




• Experience deploying and maintaining production systems at scale




• Experience working in a team alongside more junior members




• Use of automated testing, analysis, and code generation to ensure that deployed code closely matches requirements




• Experience designing public service interfaces to support both internal and publicly-facing features




• Demonstrated ability to expand, maintain, and troubleshoot public and private service APIs supporting high performance, availability, and visibility




• History of utilizing best practices for security public services, including access control, request validation and filtering, and safe database and external service usage patterns




• Ability to apply more advanced integration patterns like batch-processing and service discovery to improve performance, reliability, and ease of deployment




• Experience making substantial changes to deployed systems with minimal service disruptions or downtime using automation, monitoring, and orchestration tools

QUALIFICATIONS

• 5+ years experience building and deploying distributed systems at scale




• Familiarity with the tools and workflows used by distributed software development teams




• Deep experience and/or certifications with Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, and modern observability platforms (Prometheus, Grafana, and centralized log management)




• Ability to write technical documentation in English for team members and external developers on how to use, monitor, and troubleshoot systems




• Bonus points for being a ZeroTier user, more advanced knowledge of networking, including TCP/IP, Linux networking internals, routing, and firewalls. Similarly, knowledge of modern frontend tooling like React will help you support our UI team in building end-user-facing features.




• We encourage candidates from non-traditional backgrounds to apply, regardless of formal education, training, and certification.




• We value diversity of experience and perspectives on our team, and strive to maintain a culture that allows every team member to do great work, bring their best ideas forward, and align those efforts with company goals and practices.

BENEFITS

• Hybrid / remote work




• Equity compensation package




• Generous employer-paid health insurance, including preventative dental care for adults




• Pension / Retirement Plan




• Flexible PTO policy




• Flexible work hours (subject to manager approval)




• Maternal and paternal leave




• Career Enhancement Funds




• Employee Referral Bonus

ZeroTier develops software that automatically handles the complexities of networking across physical network boundaries, dealing with mobility and unifying cloud & edge to free customers from spending time building their projects and focus on running their business. Our network virtualization technology delivers the power of enterprise software-defined networking to every device, service, and application whether it’s located at the edge or in the cloud. It’s capable enough for large businesses with complex networking needs but easy enough that tens of thousands of regular people use it to do simple things like play games online or connect to their home PC from their mobile device.

We work to solve the hard technical problems underlying decentralized application development so you can deliver applications that offer a positive low-friction user experience while avoiding the cost, liability, and security/privacy impact of a large highly involved cloud presence.

ZeroTier was founded by Adam Ierymenko in 2015.

The company’s network virtualization software is used by millions of users in over 230 countries and territories. For more information about us please visit our website at www.zerotier.com