SmartVerify — Cloud Native Sr. Engineer (Data Plane)

Job Title: Cloud Native Sr. Engineer, Data Plane
Location: Fully Remote (Need to reside in Greater Vancouver BC, Canada)
Visa: Can sponsor work-permit and PR in Canada
Compensation (commensurate with experience/profile): $140K-$160K CAD annual, plus equity commensurate with experience and expected impact.
Benefits: Access to company offered medical insurance plan and 401(K) in the US
Level: Sr Engineer
Reports To: Principal Engineer
Must Include LinkedIn Profile and Resume in the application.

Application Process: Resume and LinkedIn profile mandatory

*DO NOT APPLY IF YOU CANNOT PROVIDE RESUME, LINKEDIN PROFILE and REFERENCES
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Interview Process: In-person onsite interview mandatory

*DO NOT APPLY IF YOU CANNOT ATTEND IN PERSON INTERVIEW
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About SmartVerify
SmartVerify is the data security and compliance layer for enterprise AI. We sit inline between AI agents and the data they query, inspecting every interaction, enforcing policy, and producing the audit trail that maps to TRAIGA, the Colorado AI Act, California DROP, and the EU AI Act. We are a small, technical team building infrastructure that enterprise security teams and regulators will rely on.

The Role
We are looking for a Software Engineer to join and own the data plane. This is not a feature engineering role. You will be working close to the metal — on proxy internals, systems programming, and the infrastructure that makes inline inspection possible at production scale.

You will report to the Principal Backend Engineer and work closely with a small, senior team. There is real mentorship available here, and real ownership too. If you are early in your career but have gone deep on systems programming through open source contributions, coursework, or personal projects we want to hear from you. Please don't hesitate to send links to any relevant work. We read everything.

This is not an application development role. It is a systems engineering role for someone who thinks carefully about microseconds, memory layout, and failure modes, and who wants that work to matter for data privacy and AI governance.

What you will own

• The Envoy stack on the data plane
  
• WASM filter development for deep packet inspection within the Envoy data plane
• EKS deployment, Helm charts, GitOps workflows, and CI/CD pipelines for data plane services
• Observability eg- Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, and alerting for the hot path
• Redis sidecar integration for low-latency classification cache
• Audit log stream ensuring every inspected event is emitted reliably and durably
• Contributing to ADR authorship as the data plane evolves
• Requirements

Must Have

1. Rust or Go or C++ — production-quality systems code
2. Kubernetes — deploying and operating workloads in EKS or similar
3. Distributed systems fundamentals — concurrency, failure modes, consistency trade-offs
4. Comfort with low-level networking concepts (TCP/IP, proxies, packet flow)
5. Strong debugging skills in complex multi-component environments
6. Ability to read and reason about open source systems code (not just use it)
7. Located in BC, Canada — able to travel to Vancouver with 3 days notice

Nice to Have

1. Envoy proxy — configuration, extension, or filter development
2. WebAssembly (WASM) — any context: browser, server-side, or embedded
3. CNCF project contribution — Kubernetes, Envoy, or related upstream work
4. gRPC and Protocol Buffers
5. AWS platform — EKS, IAM, KMS, Kinesis
6. Observability tooling — Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry
7. Experience with mTLS, SPIFFE/SPIRE, or workload identity
8. Exposure to security, compliance, or audit logging systems

What matters

• You have gone deep on at least one systems programming project — not just used a framework, but understood what is happening underneath it
• You are comfortable reading open source code (Envoy, Kubernetes, WASM runtimes) to understand how something actually works
• You have strong opinions about correctness, failure handling, and observability — and you can articulate why
• You are early in your career but not early in your thinking — you ask good questions and you know what you do not know
• CNCF community participation — contributing to Kubernetes, Envoy, or related upstream projects — is a genuine differentiator here

Why Join SmartVerify?

• Solve Hard Problems: This isn't a standard REST API role. You are solving problems related to distributed state, latency, and grid computing.
• AI-Ready Security: You are building the infrastructure that will enable enterprises to safely adopt the next generation of AI tools.
• Architectural Ownership: You will define how our Control Plane scales from Day 1 to Day 1,000.
• Equity upside: the role will be compensated with equity that is commensurate with value creation from solving hard technical problems.
• Remote-first team. Flexible schedule. PR Sponsorship in Canada.
• Access to company offered medical insurance plan and 401(K) in the US

To apply:

1. Upload your resume
2. Include your linkedin profile
3. Include your answers to the questions below
4. Do you need visa sponsorship in the US or Canada?
5. How many years of experience do you have in Envoy Proxy/ xDS stack?