Principal Software Engineer

Location: Toronto, Ontario

Department: Networking

Job Summary

The Principal Software Engineer - Cloud Native and SASE focused will lead the design and implementation of a cloud-native, multi-tenant SASE solution and its interaction with a globally distributed customer network. This is a hands-on architecture role responsible for defining how customer traffic is managed across regions and gateways, while shaping scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient platform capabilities. The role is critical to delivering production-grade distributed systems that improve performance, availability, multi-tenancy, and operational efficiency.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and technical design of SASE control-plane services that manage tenant configuration, policy, routing, lifecycle, and per-tenant usage across regions.
• Define and implement orchestration patterns for configuration, telemetry, and lifecycle management across a distributed gateway fleet.
• Design scalable and highly available cloud-native systems that support dynamic gateway scaling, failover, multi-AZ deployment, and multi-region traffic management.
• Evaluate and design multi-tenancy models, including siloed, pooled, containerized, and hybrid approaches, with clear trade-off analysis across scale, isolation, performance, and cost.
• Partner closely with data-plane teams to define APIs, traffic flows, and policy enforcement mechanisms for tunnels, routing, roaming, private-network connectivity, and gateway interactions.
• Establish deployment methodologies and engineering standards for CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, rollouts, and resilience in partnership with DevOps and SRE teams.
• Provide technical leadership by breaking architecture into executable roadmaps, writing and reviewing code, mentoring senior engineers, and influencing technical direction across multiple teams.
• Drive platform efficiency and COGs optimization through architecture decisions, resource utilization improvements, and operational scale strategies.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems in SaaS, networking, or security platform environments.
• 3+ years of experience in a Staff, Principal, or Architect-level role with end-to-end ownership of architecture and delivery.
• 5+ years of experience working with SASE, SSE, SD-WAN, secure web gateway, cloud firewall, VPN, or ZTNA technologies, including large-scale gateway or concentrator deployments.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience designing or supporting multi-tenant architectures, including tenant-aware configuration, telemetry, usage controls, and resource isolation models.
• 3+ years of production experience with containers, Kubernetes, cloud-native service design, autoscaling, resilience patterns, and multi-region deployments.

Preferred Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience working with data plane concepts such as IPSec, WireGuard, TLS-based tunnels, routing, policy enforcement, and private-network connectivity.
• 3+ years of experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation, and observability frameworks for distributed systems.
• 3+ years of experience with private or public cloud platforms such as AWS, OCI, or similar cloud environments.
• Strong hands-on experience with backend engineering languages such as Go, Java, C++, Rust, or similar systems languages.
• Experience with distributed systems technologies including Kafka, Redis, Cassandra, ELK stack, or similar messaging, data, and observability platforms.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers, influence architecture across multiple teams, and translate complex technical strategy into executable delivery roadmaps.