Principal Software Engineer

Join our team as a Principal Software Engineer!

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join our R&D organization and take technical ownership of foundational capabilities at the heart of Cyolo’s platform.

This is a senior, deeply hands-on technical leadership role, combining architectural responsibility with substantial involvement in design, implementation, and production problem-solving. You will shape and build critical systems spanning distributed systems, networking, infrastructure, high availability, reliability, and performance.

Reporting directly to the VP of R&D, you will play a central role in the evolution, reliability, and scalability of Cyolo’s technology as our product and customer base continue to grow.

Cyolo provides secure access solutions for organizations operating complex and mission-critical environments. Our technology enables customers to securely connect people to the applications and operational systems they need—without compromising security, resilience, or productivity.

Responsibilities

• Core platform architecture: Own the architecture and evolution of foundational capabilities across Cyolo’s platform, translating complex technical requirements into pragmatic, maintainable solutions.
• Hands-on software development: Design, implement, test, and operate high-quality production software, remaining closely involved in the code and leading through technical execution.
• Distributed systems and networking: Develop and evolve capabilities related to clustering, distributed consensus, service communication, high availability, and our network stack.
• Technical ownership: Take end-to-end responsibility for critical components—from architectural decisions and implementation through observability, deployment, production operation, and continuous improvement.
• Reliability and performance: Solve challenging problems involving concurrency, scale, resilience, failure recovery, resource utilization, and system performance.
• Engineering excellence: Help establish and promote strong engineering practices in areas such as design, code quality, testing, maintainability, observability, and operational readiness.
• Technical leadership and mentoring: Review designs and code, mentor engineers, and serve as a trusted technical partner to engineering leadership and development teams.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Work closely with Product, DevOps, Security, QA, and other engineering teams to deliver cohesive solutions to complex customer and product requirements.
• Long-term technical direction: Identify architectural risks, technical debt, and opportunities for improvement, and lead initiatives that strengthen the platform over time.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software development experience, although demonstrated technical depth, judgment, and ownership are more important to us than a specific number of years.
• Experience operating as a senior engineer, technical lead, software architect, or principal contributor on complex production systems.
• Proven experience designing and building software involving distributed systems, networking, infrastructure, or other systems-level challenges.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, concurrency, availability, consistency, performance, resilience, and failure handling.
• Hands-on experience developing production software in Go or another systems-oriented programming language.
• Strong understanding of networking concepts and protocols, with the ability to diagnose complex problems across application, operating-system, and network boundaries.
• Demonstrated ability to take ownership of substantial technical areas and carry them from architectural design through implementation and production operation.
• Experience working cross-functionally with Product, DevOps, Security, QA, and other engineering stakeholders.
• The ability to make sound engineering trade-offs and communicate complex technical decisions clearly.
• A genuine passion for software engineering, including curiosity about how systems work beneath the surface and a desire to continually improve them.
• A high-ownership mindset, strong execution capabilities, and the independence to lead critical technical initiatives.
• High proficiency in English, both written and verbal.

An advantage

• Experience with consensus algorithms such as Raft, clustered systems, or highly available platforms.
• Experience developing security, networking, infrastructure, database, storage, or distributed-platform products.
• Familiarity with Linux internals, containers, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, or low-level network troubleshooting.