Job Description

The Role

As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Vault Customer Engineering team, you will play a critical role in sustaining and enhancing HashiCorp Vault, ensuring it remains a secure, reliable, and performant secrets management solution. You will own and drive complex technical solutions, lead investigations into critical customer issues, and collaborate cross-functionally to improve Vault’s core capabilities.

With 6+ years of experience in backend development, distributed systems, and cloud security, you will design, implement, and optimize solutions that improve operability, scalability, and maintainability. You will serve as a technical mentor for other engineers and contribute directly to the evolution of Vault by addressing high-impact customer and partner concerns.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead investigations into complex customer-reported issues, identifying root causes and driving long-term solutions.
• Architect and develop improvements to Vault’s core functionality, ensuring high performance, security, and reliability.
• Work closely with cross-functional teams, including product, security, and support teams, to prioritize and resolve customer-impacting issues.
• Enhance debugging, monitoring, and observability tools, making Vault more maintainable and scalable.
• Optimize Vault’s performance and reliability by addressing bottlenecks, improving system architecture, and strengthening security.
• Mentor and guide engineers, conducting code reviews, sharing best practices, and fostering a culture of technical excellence.
• Engage with the Vault open-source community, contributing to discussions, resolving key issues, and driving external collaboration.
• Stay ahead of industry trends in security and secrets management, helping shape Vault’s future roadmap.

This role is ideal for a senior engineer passionate about distributed systems, cloud security, and debugging complex technical challenges while making high-impact contributions to a widely used secrets management platform.

What you’ll do (responsibilities)

We’re looking for Senior Engineers with a deep backend focus to join our team. In this role, you can expect to:

• Design, prototype and implement features and tools while ensuring stability and usability
• Collaborate closely with Product Design and Product Management partners, as well as engineers on your team and others
• Act as a subject matter expert on quality development with an emphasis on Golang development
• Lead and execute large-scale projects, ensuring the reliable delivery of key features from design through full implementation and troubleshooting.
• Drive end-to-end project lifecycle, including architecture design, implementation, and issue resolution, with a focus on quality and efficiency.
• Evaluate project tradeoffs and propose solutions, proactively removing blockers and keeping stakeholders informed on progress, issues, and milestones.
• Collaborate with internal teams, customers, and external stakeholders to design solutions that align with requirements and customer needs.
• Advocate for strategic technical roadmap initiatives that enhance the system’s overall effectiveness across teams and the organization.
• Debug and resolve complex issues to improve the quality and stability of products or solutions
• Review and assess code for quality, design patterns, and optimization opportunities, ensuring best practices are followed
• Mentor and guide software engineers, sharing technical knowledge and promoting best practices in development processes
• Facilitate collaborative team activities, such as code pairing and group troubleshooting, to foster a productive and cohesive team environment
• Support reliable production environments, including participating in an oncall rotation
• Strive for quality through maintainable code and comprehensive testing from development to deployment

What you’ll need (basic qualifications)

• You have at least 6+ years of experience as an engineer
• You have professional experience developing with modern programming languages and frameworks, and are interested in working in Golang and Ruby specifically
• You have experience working with distributed systems, particularly on a cloud provider such as AWS, Azure or GCP, with a focus on scalability, resilience and security.
• Emerging ability to direct work and influence others, with a strategic approach to problem-solving and decision-making in a collaborative environment
• Demonstrated business acumen and customer focus, with a readiness for change and adaptability in dynamic situations
• Cloud-native mindset and so
• lid understanding of DevOps principles in a cloud environment
• Familiarity with cloud monitoring tools to implement robust observability practices that prioritize metrics, logging and tracing for high reliability and performance.
• Intentional focus on stakeholder management and effective communication, fostering trust and relationship-building across diverse teams
• Integrated skills in critical thinking and data-driven analysis, promoting a growth mindset and continuous improvement to support high-quality outcomes

What's nice to have (preferred qualifications)

• You have experience using HashiCorp products (Terraform, Packer, Waypoint, Nomad, Vault, Boundary, Consul).
• You have prior experience working in cloud platform engineering teams.