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Staff Software Engineer | Systems and L7 Protocols

Formal· Engineering
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San FranciscoFull-timePosted 4mo ago

About the role

Staff Software Engineer focusing on protocol-aware proxies and distributed backend systems to coordinate proxies, with a stack including Go, Rust, Temporal, and AWS. Builds protocol parsing, authentication handshakes, and performance-optimized traffic paths across protocols like PostgreSQL, MySQL, SSH, HTTP, and MCP.

Responsibilities

  • Build application-layer proxies for databases, infrastructure, and AI tools, working directly with protocols such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, SSH, HTTP, and MCP.
  • Implement how Formal parses and modifies protocol messages, handles authentication handshakes, and manages connections and streaming responses.
  • Extend protocol support to work with more clients, drivers, and upstream systems, preserving their expected behavior through the proxy.
  • Build the distributed services that configure and coordinate proxies, synchronize state, and process the events they produce.
  • Solve production problems across the traffic path, improving throughput, latency, memory usage, and connection reliability.

Qualifications

  • Experience building systems software, proxies, database internals, networking software, or distributed services.
  • Experience with Go, Rust, or another language used for systems programming.
  • Strong networking fundamentals, including TCP, TLS, connection management, and application-layer protocols.
  • Experience building concurrent software and reasoning about resource usage, timeouts, and partial failures.
  • Experience debugging production systems using logs, traces, profiling, or packet captures.
  • A preference for simple, maintainable code and ownership from design through production.

Skills

Required:Proxies and protocol handlingGoRustNetworkingConcurrencyProduction debuggingSystem design & ownership
Nice to have:Protocol protocols

Benefits

  • 100% medical, dental & vision insurance coverage for you
  • Partially covered for your dependents
  • Flexible PTO
Last updated Oct 14, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Formal

The data security platform for datastores and APIs

Formal is the leading data security and infrastructure access platform that secures modern data stacks, helping security teams understand their organization's data schema in real-time, see where sensitive data is stored, how it's consumed across teams and services, and design access and encryption policies.

Data SecurityAPIsDatastoresSecurity
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