Principal Software Engineer - Service Networking

San Mateo, CA · San Mateo · USD 295,250-345,040 / year · 8+ years experience · Full-time · Onsite · Posted Oct 6, 2026

At a glance

The Principal Software Engineer on the Service Networking team will lead the technical direction and development of service-to-service communication systems. This role focuses on evolving an Envoy- and Istio-based platform across Kubernetes, Nomad, and cloud environments to ensure reliable, secure, and efficient connectivity.

Set the technical strategy and roadmap for service mesh, balancing reliability, security, performance, and operating cost.
Design and build control-plane and data-plane capabilities for service discovery, routing, load balancing, and traffic policy.
Lead integration and migration across Kubernetes, Nomad, and cloud environments.
Partner with Security and application teams to deliver workload identity, mutual TLS, and traffic policy enforcement.
Improve resource efficiency and operational reliability through performance analysis, testing, observability, incident response, and deployment automation.
Lead technical decisions across teams, write and review production code, and mentor senior engineers.

8+ years of software engineering experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
Expertise in service mesh, proxies, application gateways, or a closely related infrastructure domain.
Strong understanding of networking fundamentals, service discovery, traffic management, failure isolation, and secure service communication.
Strong programming skills in Go, C++, Rust, or another systems language.
Experience operating Kubernetes or comparable orchestration platforms in production.
Experience leading infrastructure migrations or performance improvements.
Record of turning ambiguous problems into technical direction and coordinated execution.