Sr. Staff Engineer

Onwards Together!

Illumio is the leader in ransomware and breach containment, redefining how organizations contain cyberattacks and enable operational resilience. Powered by the Illumio AI Security Graph, our breach containment platform identifies and contains threats across hybrid multi-cloud environments – stopping the spread of attacks before they become disasters.

Recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™ for Microsegmentation, Illumio enables Zero Trust, strengthening cyber resilience for the infrastructure, systems, and organizations that keep the world running.

Our Team's Vision

Illumio is the leader in ransomware and breach containment, redefining how organizations contain cyberattacks and enable operational resilience. Powered by the Illumio AI Security Graph, our breach containment platform identifies and contains threats across hybrid multi-cloud environments, stopping the spread of attacks before they become disasters. Recognized as a Leader in the Forrester Wave™ for Micro segmentation, Illumio enables Zero Trust and strengthens cyber resilience for the infrastructure, systems, and organizations that keep the world running.

Our Engineering team is driven by a culture that thrives on visionary leadership, autonomy, and ownership. You'll work alongside exceptional engineers solving some of the most challenging problems in distributed systems, cloud security, networking, and large-scale platform architecture. We believe diverse perspectives and technical excellence are critical to building world-class cybersecurity products.

As a senior technical leader on the Architecture Team, you will help define the next generation of Illumio's platform and services. You will influence engineering direction across multiple product areas, establish technical standards, and drive architectural decisions that impact customers globally.

Your Impact

• Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of large-scale distributed systems powering Illumio's cloud platform.

• Drive long-term technical strategy and architectural direction across multiple engineering organizations.

• Design highly scalable, resilient, and observable backend services capable of operating at significant scale.

• Partner closely with Engineering, Product Management, Security, and Infrastructure teams to align architecture with business objectives.

• Establish frameworks, patterns, and engineering standards that improve system reliability, maintainability, and developer productivity.

• Act as a trusted technical advisor and mentor to Staff and Senior Engineers across the organization.

• Influence key technology decisions involving cloud-native architecture, microservices, messaging systems, data platforms, and service orchestration.

• Lead resolution of complex architectural challenges involving performance, availability, reliability, and security.

• Evaluate emerging technologies and drive adoption of innovations that improve platform capabilities and operational excellence.

• Champion engineering best practices including design reviews, operational readiness, observability, testing strategies, and technical debt reduction.

• Represent architecture decisions to technical and executive stakeholders and build alignment across teams.

This role aligns with Illumio's Senior Staff/Expert-level expectations, requiring broad expertise, leadership across multiple disciplines, independent judgment on significant business-impacting initiatives, and influence that extends across the engineering organization.

Your Toolkit

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related technical discipline. Advanced degree preferred.

• 12+ years of professional software engineering experience building large-scale backend and distributed systems.

• Proven experience designing and operating highly available, cloud-native platforms in production environments.

• Deep expertise in distributed systems concepts including consistency models, fault tolerance, consensus, service discovery, caching, messaging, and resiliency patterns.

• Expert-level proficiency in Java and/or Go, with strong software architecture and design skills.

• Experience building and operating microservices-based architectures at scale.

• Strong knowledge of public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.

• Experience with Kubernetes, containers, and modern cloud orchestration technologies.

• Deep understanding of API design, event-driven architectures, and service-to-service communication patterns.

• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.

• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across an organization.

Bonus Points

• Experience building cybersecurity, networking, or Zero Trust products.

• Contributions to open-source projects or participation in engineering communities.

• Experience scaling globally distributed systems supporting enterprise customers.

• Published technical content, conference speaking, or recognized thought leadership within backend architecture and distributed systems.

Our Commitment

Illumio believes that an environment of unique backgrounds, experiences, viewpoints, and individual contributions creates a culture of belonging, drives our future, and makes us stronger together in support of our customers and their success.

We are committed to creating an inclusive environment where all employees can bring their best selves to work. We value individuals who Build Trust, Run to Challenges, Seek Truth, Leverage Differences, Bring Your Best, and move Onwards, Together.

#LI-TD-Onsite

Our Commitment

Illumio believes that an environment of unique backgrounds, experiences, viewpoints, and individual contributions creates a culture of belonging, drives our future, and makes us stronger together in support of our customers and their success.

All official job offers from our company are extended directly by our recruitment team and will be sent through an official E-Signature document for your review and signature. Please be aware that we do not ask for any personal information in the process of extending offers of employment, such as financial details or social security numbers. Upon acceptance of any offer, we will request such information as part of the onboarding process prior to or on your first day of employment, and only after completing a background check through an authorized third-party vendor. If you receive any communication asking for personal details outside of these processes, please contact us immediately to verify the authenticity of the request. Your security is important to us, and we are committed to a safe and transparent hiring experience.

For roles in San Francisco and Los Angeles: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring, Illumio will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Department: Engineering