{"id":2103253,"url":"https://alion.io/job/vectra-senior-software-engineer-network-protocols-data-plane","title":"Senior Software Engineer - Network Protocols & Data Plane","company":{"id":22674,"name":"Vectra","domain":"vectra.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/vectra","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":78,"open_postings":11,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.818,"repost_share":0.091,"time_to_fill_p50_days":26,"computed_at":"2026-10-09T06:01:00Z"}},"role":"Networking","role_family":"Networking","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Bengaluru, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":22000,"max_usd":54000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":490},"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Debian","optional":false},{"name":"eBPF","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"Jenkins","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"MITRE D3FEND","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"Suricata","optional":false},{"name":"Vectra AI","optional":false},{"name":"Wireshark","optional":false},{"name":"Zeek","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-08T16:57:44Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-08","last_verified_at":"2026-10-09T22:12:37Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"Vectra® is the leader in AI-driven threat detection and response for hybrid and multi-cloud enterprises.\nThe Vectra AI Platform delivers integrated signal across public cloud, SaaS, identity, and data center networks in a single platform. Powered by patented Attack Signal Intelligence, it empowers security teams to rapidly prioritize, investigate and respond to the most advanced cyber-attacks. With 35 patents in AI-driven threat detection and the most vendor references in MITRE D3FEND, organizations worldwide rely on the Vectra AI to move at the speed and scale of hybrid attackers. For more information, visit www.vectra.ai. \nPosition Overview\nVectra is looking for senior, AI-forward engineers to help expand and modernize our network data plane. This team builds the high-performance systems that ingest, process, parse, enrich, and deliver network metadata used by our detection, investigation, and response platform.\nThis role sits at the center of Vectra's packet-processing architecture. You will work on the systems that receive network traffic, steer it through the right processing paths, extract meaningful protocol metadata, and deliver that data reliably through the platform at production scale. Protocol parsing is a major part of the mission, but the broader opportunity is to help shape a scalable data plane that can support more protocols, higher throughput, better validation, and faster delivery over time.\nThe work requires systems engineering depth, hands-on networking experience, and comfort operating close to Linux, packet capture, hardware constraints, and performance limits. We are looking for engineers who can operate independently, use modern AI-assisted development tools effectively, and help build a repeatable engine for delivering data-plane capabilities with strong validation, test coverage, performance discipline, and operational reliability.\nResponsibilities\nDesign, implement, test, and maintain core network data-plane capabilities, including packet processing, protocol parsing, metadata extraction, and downstream delivery.\nImprove scalable network data-path architecture on Linux, including packet ingestion, traffic steering, parser execution, metadata modeling, and downstream delivery.\nUse AI-assisted development tools thoughtfully to accelerate investigation, implementation, test generation, and code review while maintaining engineering rigor.\nWork across parsing, serialization, metadata modeling, validation, performance, and downstream platform integration.\nBuild feedback loops and test harnesses that validate data-plane behavior end-to-end, not just in isolated parser tests.\nDiagnose correctness, performance, memory, concurrency, and reliability issues in complex packet-processing systems.\nCollaborate with Product, Security Research, Data Science, and engineering teams to turn customer and platform needs into concrete technical outcomes.\nContribute to technical direction, design reviews, and engineering standards for network data-plane development.\nRequirements\n8+ years of professional software engineering experience .\n5+ years of production C++ experience in systems, infrastructure, networking, or similarly performance-sensitive environments.\nMeaningful Rust experience or demonstrated ability to build production-quality systems in Rust or another memory-safe systems language.\nStrong Python coding, debugging, automation, and code review experience.\nExperience developing and debugging software on Debian-based Linux or similar Linux environments.\nHands-on protocol experience, including inspecting packet captures, using Wireshark or equivalent tools, and implementing or debugging parsing and serialization logic.\nExperience with substantial data-path technologies such as DPDK, XDP/AF_XDP, kernel-bypass networking, high-performance packet capture, or equivalent systems.\nUnderstanding of NIC queues, RSS, tunneling, offloads, routing, traffic steering, and the practical constraints of packet-processing hardware.\nSystems programming depth across Linux networking internals, allocators and memory ownership, data structures, concurrency, CPU/cache behavior, and performance diagnosis.\nExperience building reliable, maintainable systems where correctness, throughput, latency, and operational reliability all matter.\nAbility to troubleshoot complex systems using measurement, logs, traces, packet captures, profiling, and careful reasoning.\nOwnership mindset: able to take a problem, clarify ambiguity, make tradeoffs visible, and drive it to completion.\nStrong communication and collaboration skills across distributed teams.\nPreferred\nExperience building protocol parsers, packet-processing systems, network telemetry systems, or high-throughput data pipelines.\nExperience with parser validation, fuzzing, golden datasets, packet replay frameworks, or property-based testing.\nFamiliarity with DPDK, Linux networking internals, eBPF, XDP/AF_XDP, Suricata, Zeek, or similar systems.\nExperience tuning systems across CPU, memory, NUMA, storage, and network boundaries.\nExperience designing schemas or metadata models consumed by downstream analytics, search, detection, or investigation workflows.\nExperience with CI/CD, Jenkins or similar systems, and Git-based development workflows.\nWhat We’re Looking For\nThe strongest candidates will be hands-on builders who are energized by hard systems problems. They should be comfortable moving fast, but not casually; quality, testability, maintainability, and performance all matter. We are especially interested in engineers who already use AI tools as part of their development workflow and can explain how they use them responsibly to improve speed, coverage, and understanding.\nEducation\nB.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.\nVectra provides a comprehensive total rewards package that supportsthe financial, physical, mental and overall health of our employees and their families. Compensation includes competitive base pay, incentive plan eligibility, and participation in the employee equity plan (stock options). Specific benefitsofferedvariesby location, but commonly include health care insurance, income protection/ life insurance, access to retirement savings plans, behavioral & emotional wellness services, generous time away from work, and a comprehensive employee recognition program.\nVectra is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. \nWe are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6705,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity","Life insurance","Retirement plans","Stock options"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Cybersecurity","Threat Intelligence","Information Security"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-08T19:24:57Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":63,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.632,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":26,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-09T06:01:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/vectra-senior-software-engineer-network-protocols-data-plane","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/vectra-senior-software-engineer-network-protocols-data-plane.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-10T00:09:11Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":141,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":4859,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-11T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":22674},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=22674"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fvectra-senior-software-engineer-network-protocols-data-plane"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fvectra-senior-software-engineer-network-protocols-data-plane"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fvectra-senior-software-engineer-network-protocols-data-plane"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/vectra-senior-software-engineer-network-protocols-data-plane\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fvectra-senior-software-engineer-network-protocols-data-plane"}]}