Senior Software Engineer, Edge

About Persona

Persona is the configurable identity platform built for businesses in a digital-first world. Verifying individuals and organizations is harder - but more important - than ever, with AI enabling fraudsters to launch sophisticated accounts at scale and regulations evolving rapidly.

We’ve built Persona to support practically every use case and industry - that’s why we’re able to serve a wide range of leading companies. For example, Reddit relies on Persona for age assurance and verification to comply with online safety regulations, protecting younger users while maintaining a seamless experience. Meanwhile, OpenAI relies on Persona to keep bad actors out, protecting one of the world’s most powerful AI platforms from large-scale abuse in a time when AI is reshaping the way we work and live.

We’re growing rapidly and looking for exceptional people to join us!

About the role

Every request Persona handles crosses our network before it reaches product code. Cloudflare, ingress, DNS, the service mesh, and all the network paths between them are the front door to everything we build, and we're investing in them to match their importance.

Persona has created a dedicated Edge (and Networking) team to own the full traffic path, from the first request at our Cloudflare edge, through ingress, and across the service mesh. Edge is Networking, Networking is Edge. Persona’s edge networking now has its own team, its own roadmap, and its own definition of done. We run it as a product. The goal is a traffic layer that every Persona engineer, or their agents, can configure, observe, and extend on their own.

Become a founding member of the Edge team. You'll be one of the first engineers, with a clear mission and real ownership from day one. You'll help define what great looks like for our traffic layer, and our customers will feel the performance and reliability gains you ship.

What you'll do at Persona

• Own edge networking configuration, including routing, WAF policy, rate limiting, and certificate management, and build toward a model where engineers make traffic changes on their own. We use Cloudflare extensively, alongside other providers.

• Shape how the team works. You'll help set our practices and technical standards across the SDLC, AI tooling, static analysis, chaos engineering, and simulation, and build top-quality engineering into the team's DNA from the start.

• Evolve the ingress layer (controllers, lifecycle, policy, and the Ingress API) so inbound traffic is reliable, observable, and self-service.

• Manage DNS across internal clusters and external zones so name resolution just works.

• Build network-layer observability for latency, error rates, and routing, so problems get caught early and fixed fast.

• Extend our networking into new regions as Persona expands globally, with designs that scale and stay easy to operate.

Your first 90 days

• Learn the full traffic path end to end: Cloudflare, ingress controllers, DNS, and our stack networking

• Ship a change to the ingress layer from design to production, and write a plan to strengthen our pre-release testing

• Write up and share your recommendation for where our Istio and multicluster gateway boundary should sit

• Find an opportunity to improve network-layer observability and drive the next step

What you'll bring to Persona

• An AI-native approach to building and shipping production services. At Persona, we believe that AI allows us to behave in fundamentally different ways than ever before. Speed is not a tradeoff, and never has been at Persona. You recognize the importance of AI and how to use AI to solve complex problems, whether through rapid prototyping or agent harnesses with self-repairing feedback loops.

• Experience diagnosing production issues at the network layer, including tracing problems through proxies and load balancers to their real source. You enjoy deep, methodical investigation, and you move quickly to triage and fix when an incident calls for it. When AI can’t solve the problem is where the fun part begins.

• Hands-on experience managing infrastructure as code. You treat change safety and governance as product features, and you enjoy designing processes that feel easy and still work.

• Hands-on networking experience in at least a few areas we care about, such as DNS, WAF, service mesh, Kubernetes ingress controllers, and network policies.

Nice to haves

• Cloudflare (Workers, WAF, Access, or Tunnel)

• Istio or another service mesh in a multi-cluster environment

• GKE or another managed Kubernetes platform at scale

• Ruby or Rails (we integrate with Ruby systems)

• A hacker's heart: you love prototyping new ideas and ways of working, and you value what experiments teach you even when they stay prototypes

Benefits and Perks

For full-time US-based employees (excluding internship and contractor opportunities), Persona offers a wide range of benefits, including medical, dental, and vision, 3% 401(k) contribution, unlimited PTO, quarterly mental health days, family planning benefits, professional development stipend, wellness benefits, among others.

For full-time UK employees, Persona offers a wide range of benefits, including private medical insurance, dental insurance, a 6% employer pension contribution, unlimited PTO, a monthly wellness stipend, professional development stipend, co-working stipend, and more.

As part of our interview process, all candidates will be asked to verify their identity with Persona. This step is used solely to confirm that candidates are who they say they are, and will have no impact on hiring decisions.