Job description
Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly’s edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers’ applications as close to their end-users as possible — at the edge of the Internet. The platform is designed to take advantage of the modern internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development. Fastly’s customers include many of the world’s most prominent companies, including Vimeo, Pinterest, The New York Times, and GitHub.
We’re building a more trustworthy Internet. Come join us.
Posting Open Date: May 8, 2025
Anticipated Posting Close Date*: June 9, 2025
*Job posting may close early due to the volume of applicants.
Principal Software Engineer, Edge Delivery
The Edge Delivery team maintains Varnish, Fastly’s core caching platform, as well as adjacent services and tooling. Leveraging C and Rust in different codebases, the team develops a highly-scalable service platform which is responsible for meeting the ever-growing and changing requirements of Fastly’s diverse customer base.
We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join this critical team and help it evolve to scale our CDN, compute & security infrastructure. This role will make hands-on contributions to the codebase, propose and design improvements to Varnish subsystems, and work as a technical leader with other team members and cross-functionally across the engineering organization.
What You’ll Do:
- Write C and Rust code to meet the demands of Fastly’s diverse customer base
- Deliver improvements to HTTP protocol support, caching storage and customer logic execution areas in Varnish, and integrate with libraries and services operated by other teams
- Technical leadership of full lifecycle projects, driving project progress and communicating project status to stakeholders
- Coordinate and communicate seamlessly with the team members and across other technical and cross functional teams
- Analyze and address performance, correctness and stability issues to ensure that Varnish always meets Fastly’s exacting standards of excellence
- Contribute to code reviews, improving the codebase and other team processes
- Mentor and support the professional growth of engineers, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing, innovation, and collaboration within the team
- Participate in on-call rotation
What We’re Looking For:
- You have at least 10 years of production experience as a software engineer with at least 5 of those working on networked/distributed/cloud systems at scale
- You have at least 3 years of experience with C or Rust and an affinity for using the right tool for the job
- Ability to participate in and help coordinate incident response and mitigation
- Motivated to identify pain points in existing workflows and create solutions via tools and automation
- Formal CS education is not required; demonstrable experience is sufficient
We’ll be super impressed if you have experience in any of these:
- Solid understanding of security concerns in multi-tenant systems
- Scripting languages like Python for quick prototyping
- Experience with and interest in technical writing
- High performance, massively scalable web services; particularly using Varnish, nginx, Apache Traffic Server
- Mentoring junior engineers; helping to ensure both knowledge and team culture transfers bi-directionally
- Experience socializing best practices across an engineering organization and collaborating across departments and cross functional teams
Work Hours:
- This position will require you to be available during core business hours and occasional nights and weekends as needed for on-call support.
Work Location(s) & Travel Requirements:
This position is open to hybrid and remote work locations. The following preferred hybrid office locations:
- San Francisco, CA
- New York, NY
- Denver, CO
Fastly currently embraces a largely hybrid model for most roles which allows employees flexibility to split their time between the office and home. We are also willing to consider remote candidates in the United States.
SF / LA Fair Chance Ordinance Statement
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Salary:
The estimated salary range for this position is $228,280 to $273,936.
Starting salary may vary based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as experience, skills, qualifications, and location.
This role may be eligible to participate in Fastly’s equity and discretionary bonus programs.
Benefits:
We care about you. Fastly works hard to create a positive environment for our employees, and we think your life outside of work is important too. We support our teams with great benefits that start on the first day of your employment with Fastly. Curious about our offerings?
We offer a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance. Family planning, mental health support along with Employee Assistance Program, Insurance (Life, Disability, and Accident), a Flexible Vacation policy and up to 18 days of accrued paid sick leave are there to help support our employees. We also offer 401(k) (including company match) and an Employee Stock Purchase Program. For 2025, we offer 11 paid local holidays, 11 paid company wellness days.
Why Fastly?
We have a huge impact. Fastly is a small company with a big reach. Not only do our customers have a tremendous user base, but we also support a growing number of open source projects and initiatives. Outside of code, employees are encouraged to share causes close to their heart with others so we can help lend a supportive hand.
We love distributed teams. Fastly’s home-base is in San Francisco, but we have multiple offices and employees sprinkled around the globe. As a new hire, you will be able to attend our IN-PERSON new hire orientation in our San Francisco office! It is an exciting week-long experience that we offer to new employees to build connections with colleagues across Fastly, participate in hands-on learning opportunities, and immerse yourself in our culture firsthand.
We value diversity. Growing and maintaining our inclusive and diverse team matters to us. We are committed to being a company where our employees feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work and have the ability to be successful – every day.
We are passionate. Fastly is chock full of passionate people and we’re not ‘one size fits all’. Fastly employs authors, pilots, skiers, parents (of humans and animals), makeup geeks, coffee connoisseurs, and more. We love employees for who they are and what they are passionate about.
We’re always looking for humble, sharp, and creative folks to join the Fastly team. If you think you might be a fit please apply! A fully completed application and resume or CV are required when applying.
Fastly is committed to ensuring equal employment opportunity and to providing employees with a safe and welcoming work environment free of discrimination and harassment. Our employment decisions are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, family or parental status, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.
Consistent with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and federal or state disability laws, Fastly will provide reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact your Recruiter, or the Fastly Employee Relations team at [email protected] or 501-287-4901.
Fastly collects and processes personal data submitted by job applicants in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Please see our privacy notice for job applicants.
