Sr. Staff Engineer

The role

As a senior technical leader on the Architecture Team, you will help define the next generation of Illumio's platform and services. You will influence engineering direction across multiple product areas and drive architectural decisions that impact customers globally.

What you will do

• Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of large-scale distributed systems powering Illumio's cloud platform.
• Drive long-term technical strategy and architectural direction across multiple engineering organizations.
• Design highly scalable, resilient, and observable backend services.
• Partner with Engineering, Product Management, Security, and Infrastructure teams to align architecture with business objectives.
• Establish frameworks, patterns, and engineering standards.
• Act as a technical advisor and mentor to Staff and Senior Engineers.
• Influence technology decisions involving cloud-native architecture, microservices, messaging systems, data platforms, and service orchestration.
• Lead resolution of complex architectural challenges involving performance, availability, reliability, and security.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and drive adoption of innovations.
• Champion engineering best practices including design reviews, operational readiness, observability, testing strategies, and technical debt reduction.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience building large-scale backend and distributed systems.
• Proven experience designing and operating highly available, cloud-native platforms in production environments.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems concepts including consistency models, fault tolerance, consensus, service discovery, caching, messaging, and resiliency patterns.
• Expert-level proficiency in Java and/or Go, with strong software architecture and design skills.
• Experience building and operating microservices-based architectures at scale.
• Strong knowledge of public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, and modern cloud orchestration technologies.
• Deep understanding of API design, event-driven architectures, and service-to-service communication patterns.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across an organization.

Nice to have

• Advanced degree
• Experience building cybersecurity, networking, or Zero Trust products.
• Contributions to open-source projects or participation in engineering communities.
• Experience scaling globally distributed systems supporting enterprise customers.
• Published technical content, conference speaking, or recognized thought leadership within backend architecture and distributed systems.

About the company

Illumio is the leader in ransomware and breach containment, redefining how organizations contain cyberattacks and enable operational resilience. The company enables Zero Trust, strengthening cyber resilience for infrastructure, systems, and organizations.