Principal Software Engineer - Servicemesh

Responsibilities:

• Lead the technical strategy and architecture for the service mesh platform (e. g., Istio or equivalent) across multi-cluster, multi-environment deployments.
• Drive design and implementation of traffic management, resiliency patterns, and secure service-to-service communication (mTLS, authZ/authN, policy).
• Build and evolve platform capabilities for onboarding services at scale (templates, golden paths, automation, self-service workflows).
• Partner with application, SRE, security, and network teams to define standards for service connectivity, identity, and zero-trust posture.
• Own performance, reliability, and scalability goals for the mesh control/data plane; define SLOs/SLIs and operational runbooks.
• Establish observability standards (metrics, logs, traces) and enable end-to-end visibility across services and clusters.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for incident response, root cause analysis, and long-term remediation.
• Evaluate and introduce new mesh capabilities (ambient/service-less patterns, gateways, WASM/extensibility, multi-tenancy) with clear ROI.
• Mentor senior engineers, raise engineering rigour (design reviews, technical docs, testing strategy), and influence org-wide adoption.
• Represent the team in architecture forums; communicate trade-offs and align stakeholders on platform roadmaps.

Requirements:

• 13-18 years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems and platforms.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes/container orchestration (cluster architecture, networking, upgrades, multi-cluster, RBAC, admission, controllers/operators).
• Strong hands-on experience with service mesh technologies (Istio preferred; Linkerd/Consul/App Mesh acceptable), including: Traffic management (routing, retries/timeouts, circuit breaking). Security (mTLS, cert management, identity, policy). Gateways/ingress/egress patterns and service discovery. Control plane operations and upgrade strategies.
• Strong understanding of cloud-native networking (CNI, Envoy/L7 proxies, DNS, east-west traffic, gateways, load balancing).
• Proven track record of designing for reliability and scale: SRE principles, SLOs, capacity planning, and failure-mode analysis.
• Experience building platform tooling and automation (GitOps, CI/CD, Helm/Kustomize, Terraform or similar IaC).
• Proficiency in at least one systems language (Go preferred; Java/Scala/Python acceptable) and experience building operators/controllers is a plus.
• Deep observability experience (Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing) and ability to translate telemetry into action.
• Strong security mindset (zero trust, least privilege, secret management) and experience partnering with security/compliance teams.
• Excellent communication skills, able to drive alignment across engineering orgs and influence without authority.