Software Engineer 3 - Framework

Position Summary

As a Software Engineer III, you will drive key architectural and technical decisions, lead the design and execution of complex engineering initiatives, and elevate technical standards across the Framework team. You’ll partner closely with principal engineers, product leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders to deliver resilient, scalable, and secure systems that power core ExtraHop products. This role is designed for an experienced engineer who combines deep technical expertise with strong ownership and is motivated to grow their impact through excellent engineering and active collaboration.

Our team builds high-performance network detection and monitoring systems that operate at  scale across increasingly complex protocols and data volumes.Our services and features are written primarily in C and C++  with a focus on security, scalability, stability, and reliability. Our team is focussed on enhancing, maintaining and optimizing core components of the system and  functional areas related to protocol parsing, metrics publishing, continuous packet capture and Time Series DB. 

This role focuses on designing and optimizing these core systems with an emphasis on performance, reliability and deep protocol awareness. You will work on next generation initiatives including scaling and performance improvement efforts, evolution of our data storage architecture (custom to open-source based) and early steps towards a cloud enabled model. 

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance services for ExtraHop's core Framework systems, taking ownership of moderately complex to complex features with limited guidance.
• Work across networking layers to implement and enhance protocol support
• Participate actively in technical design discussions, contribute to architecture decisions within your team, and author clear technical documentation for your work.
• Engage fully in agile development processes, including sprint planning, code reviews, and retrospectives; hold a high bar for code quality and test coverage.
• Collaborate with Product and cross-functional engineering partners such as platform , infrastructure and cloud teams  to to define technical roadmaps, break down ambiguous problems, and balance technical debt with delivery.
• Investigate, diagnose, and resolve production and performance issues independently; conduct root-cause analysis and implement preventive measures.
• Contribute to platform modernization efforts and help evaluate and adopt new technologies or frameworks in partnership with senior and principal engineers.
• Participate in on-call rotations and improve system observability, reliability and operational readiness. 

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in STEM field, Computer Science, Engineering, or related degree requiring systematic/analytical thinking
• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience designing, building, and operating production systems at scale
• Strong expertise in C and C++ 
• Experience developing on Linux Systems (multi threading, memory management, IPC etc)
• Proven ability to build and maintain performance critical systems. 
• Proven ability to debug complex issues (eg. using gdb, coredumps, performance tools)
• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals 
• Strong command of data structures, algorithms, and software design principles, with the ability to decompose complex problems into clear, actionable engineering tasks.
• Self-starter who can operate independently, manage competing priorities, and drive work to completion with minimal oversight.
• Excellent collaborator and communicator with a growth mindset and customer-first orientation.

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Experience with network protocols (eg. HTTP, SMB, Kerberos, TLS, Microsoft protocols or similar)
• Exposure to cloud platforms (AWS preferred)  or distributed systems
• Experience with observability, on-call practices and production systems
• Scripting experience (Python or similar)

Compensation & Benefits: The salary range for this role is $150,000 – $163,000 per year, plus eligibility for an annual performance-based discretionary bonus and stock option grants. We offer a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision coverage (effective day 1), a 401(k) with employer match, flexible PTO, parental leave, and more.