Senior Software Engineer (Golang & Networking)

Role Summary

Sophos Firewall is the flagship product of Sophos, operating in the network security domain to protect customer network traffic when deployed in router or switch mode.

As part of the NSG Engineering Group, you will join the Firewall Assistant team in a senior capacity. This team focuses on leveraging AI to interpret natural language queries, deliver intelligent recommendations, and automate firewall operations while upholding enterprise-grade security and compliance standards. The team’s vision is to evolve firewall management from a complex, error-prone manual process into an intuitive, conversational experience-enabling security teams to operate with greater speed, accuracy, and confidence.

What you will do

• Design, develop, and deliver production-grade backend services and scalable systems for AI-powered firewall and security management capabilities.

• Build and maintain high-performance backend services and APIs primarily using Go, with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, security, and operational excellence.

• Design and develop AI-assisted firewall capabilities that enable natural-language-driven security operations, intelligent automation, and improved user experiences.

• Work on distributed systems, backend services, APIs, and networking components supporting enterprise-grade firewall and security solutions.

• Apply strong networking fundamentals to build, troubleshoot, and optimize systems involving protocols, connectivity, traffic flows, latency, and reliability.

• Integrate AI/LLM capabilities into backend products and services, including AI assistants, agent workflows, tool integrations, and automation use cases.

• Collaborate with backend, AI, networking, firewall, cloud, and security engineering teams to deliver secure and scalable solutions.

• Take end-to-end ownership of features and services, from design and implementation through testing, deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement.

What you will bring

• 7-15 years of software engineering experience, with strong experience building backend systems and distributed services.

• Strong hands-on experience with Golang for developing production-grade backend services and APIs. Experience with Java and/or Python is also valuable.

• Strong understanding of networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, HTTP/HTTPS, DNS, routing, proxies, firewalls, network security, and network troubleshooting.

• Experience with firewall, network security, SD-WAN, networking, or cybersecurity products is a plus.

• Experience designing and building scalable backend systems, APIs, and distributed services with a strong focus on performance, reliability, security, and maintainability.

• Strong foundation in computer science fundamentals, including data structures, concurrency, networking, databases, and distributed systems.

• Experience with system design and end-to-end ownership of backend services, including APIs, data models, storage, caching, queuing, failure handling, scalability, and performance.

• Exposure to AI/LLM technologies and experience integrating AI capabilities into software products or backend systems.

• Familiarity with AI assistants, LLM APIs, agentic workflows, RAG, tool calling, MCP, or AI agent frameworks such as LangGraph, OpenAI Agents, Claude Agent SDK, or similar technologies.

• Ability to write clean, testable, maintainable, and production-quality code with a focus on robust API design and operational excellence.

• Experience with AWS or other cloud platforms, including cloud networking, IAM, deployment, observability, and performance optimization.