Sr. Engineer - Backend - Consul

About the Consul team

Note: The Consul team, as well as the majority of HashiCorp, is 100% remote and has been since our company was founded in 2012. 

Consul helps organizations automate network configurations, discover services, and enable secure connectivity across any cloud or runtime. Our customers run Consul at large scale, and we support customers that run enterprise versions of Consul on their own infrastructure, as well as building our own cloud management plane.

The customers and large community of users of Consul are platform operators, infrastructure engineers, and software developers that encounter novel performance, scaling, and usability challenges that we help them solve.

Consul started as an infrastructure management tool for service discovery, and has evolved to include a full-featured service mesh. In this role, you’ll be working on the core functionality of the Consul binary, working in Golang, with technologies including gRPC, RAFT, envoy, and SERF. You’ll help rethink and implement product architecture to meet global scale and organizational demands. 

About this role

Our product continues to evolve to meet the needs of our customers, and the service mesh technical ecosystem is expanding with newer architectures such as the use of eBPF for service mesh functionality. We are looking for an experienced engineer experienced with cloud native security and familiarity with operating system level instrumentation (through mechanisms like eBPF). 

Here is what you’ll be doing once you join our team!

First Week:

• Familiarize themselves with the existing codebase of the Consul binary and gain an understanding of its core functionality.
• Participate in introductory meetings with the team to understand the product's current state and the ongoing development tasks.
• Begin to work on small, well-defined coding tasks and bug fixes to get hands-on experience with the technologies used in the project (golang, gRPC, RAFT, envoy, and SERF).
• Collaborate with team members to get insights into the current product architecture and ongoing development initiatives.

First Month:

• Take ownership of medium-sized features and enhancements, actively contributing to the core functionality of the Consul binary.
• Engage in design discussions and brainstorming sessions to offer ideas and insights on rethinking and optimizing product architecture for better global scalability and organizational needs.
• Gain proficiency in the Consul ecosystem and service mesh capabilities, understanding how they work together to deliver robust infrastructure management solutions.
• Collaborate with other teams to ensure smooth integration and deployment of new features and enhancements.

First Three - Six Months:

• Help lead the implementation of major architectural improvements and scalability enhancements in the Consul binary, demonstrating a deep understanding of golang and related technologies (gRPC, RAFT, envoy, and SERF).
• Actively participate in code reviews and mentor junior developers, fostering a collaborative and knowledge-sharing environment within the team.
• Contribute to improving the overall performance and reliability of Consul 

One Year:

• Become a subject matter expert in Consul and service mesh technologies, guiding the team in making strategic decisions related to product development and architecture.
• Play a key role in defining the long-term roadmap for Consul, identifying new opportunities for innovation and growth.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including engineering, product, and operations, to continuously enhance Consul's capabilities and address customer needs effectively.
• Participate in an on-call rotation to resolve critical product issues for customers.

You may be a good fit for our team if you have...

• Experience in a lower-level language like Go.
• Prior experience working in high performance or distributed systems.
• Empathy for the people operating, learning, teaching and supporting software you write, and consider their experience when making design decisions and performance, security or complexity tradeoffs.
• Awareness of the broader service mesh ecosystem and an interest in contributing to a full-featured product offering while reducing complexity and barriers to adoption for practitioners.
• Interest in building and securing high availability applications using cloud native tools (Load balancers, Route 53, WAF, etc.)
• Understanding of networking fundamentals (common protocols and their applications).
• Ability to thrive in ambiguity; complex and fuzzy requirements are more common than clearly defined customer expectations.
• Experience consistently delivering high-value, high-impact projects.
• Strong written and verbal communication.
• Exemplify the HashiCorp principles.

We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We believe the more inclusive we are, the better our company will be. We do not expect candidates to meet 100% of our requirements and encourage interested candidates to apply. HashiCorp embraces diversity and equal opportunity. 

If you choose to include a cover letter, please share why you are interested in Consul/HashiCorp, as well as any experience you believe is relevant for this role.

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