Staff Engineer, AI Gateway

About the Role Netskope Secure Web Gateway (SWG) governs how global enterprises reach the web and cloud, and Real-time Protection (RTP) policy is how customers define what is allowed, blocked, or inspected. The RTP team builds the backend services and APIs that manage that policy and deliver it to the Netskope platform worldwide.

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to architect, build, and scale these services. This is a hands-on IC role with genuine ownership: you take services from design through production and are accountable for how they behave.

We work in an AI-augmented engineering culture. AI tools accelerate us, but the engineer is always the author. We want someone who can direct AI toward correct, generic solutions, recognize when it produced something that merely works instead of something that is right, and hold every line of code to the same standard: lean, meaningful, and exactly fit for its purpose.

What You Will Be Doing

• Service Architecture and Implementation. Design, build, and scale concurrent, robust microservices and APIs in Golang.
• AI as a Force Multiplier, You as the Reviewer. Use AI coding agents daily; specify problems precisely, push for generic reusable solutions, and reject output that adds technical debt or security flaws.
• Codebase Stewardship. Keep code lean and purposeful, consolidate common patterns so duplication goes down, and judge PRs on correctness, edge cases, tests, and abstraction level.
• Distributed Systems Correctness. Propagate policy configuration reliably to a global dataplane, reasoning about consistency, idempotency, caching, and failure modes.
• Customer Issue Resolution. Troubleshoot bugs and issues raised by customers in a timely manner, and turn recurring ones into structural fixes.
• Partnering Across Teams. Work with product, UI, dataplane, QA, and platform teams across time zones; raise design concerns early.
• Raising the Technical Bar. Shape engineering culture through design, architecture, and code reviews and mentorship.
• Operating What You Build. Join the shared on-call rotation and monitor the health of your services.

Required Skills and Experience

• Background. 8+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years on backend services and distributed systems.
• Golang Depth. Strong Golang skills across interface and package design, error handling, concurrency, performance profiling, and table-driven unit testing; hands-on with Gin and gRPC.
• Clean Code Mindset. Lean, readable, purposeful code; you know when an abstraction is earned and when it is premature.
• Practical AI Tooling Experience. Real-world use of LLM-based coding agents, with examples of steering them toward correct solutions and catching what they missed.
• Review Insight. Evaluate PR quality and give specific, well-reasoned feedback that improves both the code and the engineer.
• Distributed Architecture. Microservice patterns, REST/gRPC API design, event-driven systems (e.g., Kafka), and caching (e.g., Redis).
• Databases. NoSQL and SQL databases such as MongoDB and MySQL, including schema, sharding, and index design.
• Cloud-Native Delivery. Develop, deploy, and debug services on Kubernetes (e.g., Helm), and write application-level metrics (e.g., Prometheus).
• Ownership and Communication. Drive under-specified problems to shipped software. Strong verbal and written English. Proactive, timely communication; track cross-team dependencies and timelines and escalate risks early.

What Makes You Stand Out

• Background in Secure Web Gateway, Zero Trust, CASB, or DLP products.
• Ability to benchmark competing technologies and justify architectural choices with measured trade-offs.
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS control planes or policy/configuration systems.
• Hands-on cloud development on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Knowledge of emerging GenAI and cloud service security challenges and best practices.
• Experience in regulated environments such as FedRAMP.

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