Principal Engineer - Edge Delivery

Summary

Join Fastly's Edge Delivery team as a Principal Software Engineer and contribute to the evolution of their CDN, compute, and security infrastructure. You will write C and Rust code, improve Varnish subsystems, and provide technical leadership. Responsibilities include delivering improvements to HTTP protocol support and caching, integrating with other teams' services, and addressing performance issues. The ideal candidate has 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years with networked/distributed/cloud systems, and at least 3 years of experience with C or Rust. The position offers a hybrid or remote work model with a competitive salary and benefits package. Fastly values diversity and inclusion and provides a supportive work environment.

Requirements

• You have at least 10 years of production experience as a software engineer with at least 5 of those working on networked/distributed/cloud systems at scale
• You have at least 3 years of experience with C or Rust and an affinity for using the right tool for the job
• Ability to participate in and help coordinate incident response and mitigation
• Motivated to identify pain points in existing workflows and create solutions via tools and automation
• Formal CS education is not required; demonstrable experience is sufficient

Responsibilities

• Write C and Rust code to meet the demands of Fastly’s diverse customer base
• Deliver improvements to HTTP protocol support, caching storage and customer logic execution areas in Varnish, and integrate with libraries and services operated by other teams
• Technical leadership of full lifecycle projects, driving project progress and communicating project status to stakeholders
• Coordinate and communicate seamlessly with the team members and across other technical and cross functional teams
• Analyze and address performance, correctness and stability issues to ensure that Varnish always meets Fastly's exacting standards of excellence
• Contribute to code reviews, improving the codebase and other team processes
• Mentor and support the professional growth of engineers, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing, innovation, and collaboration within the team
• Participate in on-call rotation

Preferred Qualifications

• Solid understanding of security concerns in multi-tenant systems
• Scripting languages like Python for quick prototyping
• Experience with and interest in technical writing
• High performance, massively scalable web services; particularly using Varnish, nginx, Apache Traffic Server
• Mentoring junior engineers; helping to ensure both knowledge and team culture transfers bi-directionally
• Experience socializing best practices across an engineering organization and collaborating across departments and cross functional teams

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Family planning, mental health support along with Employee Assistance Program
• Insurance (Life, Disability, and Accident)
• A Flexible Vacation policy and up to 18 days of accrued paid sick leave
• 401(k) (including company match) and an Employee Stock Purchase Program
• For 2025, we offer 11 paid local holidays, 11 paid company wellness days