Principal Engineer

Posting Open Date: May 8, 2025

Anticipated Posting Close Date*: June 9, 2025

*Job posting may close early due to the volume of applicants.

Principal Software Engineer, Edge Delivery

The Edge Delivery team maintains Varnish, Fastly’s core caching platform, as well as adjacent services and tooling. Leveraging C and Rust in different codebases, the team develops a highly-scalable service platform which is responsible for meeting the ever-growing and changing requirements of Fastly's diverse customer base.

We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join this critical team and help it evolve to scale our CDN, compute & security infrastructure. This role will make hands-on contributions to the codebase, propose and design improvements to Varnish subsystems, and work as a technical leader with other team members and cross-functionally across the engineering organization.

What You'll Do:

• 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 

What We're Looking For: 

• 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

We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these: 

• 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

Work Hours:

• This position will require you to be available during core business hours and occasional nights and weekends as needed for on-call support. 

Work Location(s) & Travel Requirements: 

This position is open to hybrid and remote work locations. The following preferred hybrid office locations:

• San Francisco, CA
• New York, NY
• Denver, CO

Fastly currently embraces a largely hybrid model for most roles which allows employees flexibility to split their time between the office and home. We are also willing to consider remote candidates in the United States.

SF / LA Fair Chance Ordinance Statement

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Salary: 

The estimated salary range for this position is $228,280 to $273,936. 

Starting salary may vary based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as experience, skills, qualifications, and location.

This role may be eligible to participate in Fastly’s equity and discretionary bonus programs.

Benefits:

We care about you. Fastly works hard to create a positive environment for our employees, and we think your life outside of work is important too. We support our teams with great benefits that start on the first day of your employment with Fastly. Curious about our offerings? 

We offer a comprehensive benefits package including 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 are there to help support our employees. We also offer 401(k) (including company match) and an Employee Stock Purchase Program. For 2025, we offer 11 paid local holidays, 11 paid company wellness days.